[gPXE] Upgrading gPxe boot protocol from 2.07 to 2.08 ?

[Laurent Eschenauer]

On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 5:36 PM, Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 8, 2012 at 3:53 PM, Laurent Eschenauer
> <laurent at eschenauer.be> wrote:
> > Below is a kinda crazy idea that I'm working on, and I'm now stuck due
> to my
> > gPxe kernel not having the 'boot protocol' >= 2.08. I'm not a kernel
> guru;
> > so I hope someone on this list may have some ideas/pointers to move
> > forward.
> >
> > The context:
> > I'm trying to create an Amazon EC2 AMI that just boots a gPxe kernel
> which
> > then chain to the EC2 user data to get its pxe configuration. This would
> > enable to directly provision any kind of machine on EC2 using pxe,
> removing
> > the hassle of building/uploading images. Kickstart based install also
> enable
> > to customize the partition table, the packages, etc..
> >
> > What I did so far:
> > EC2 (which is Xen based) enable to boot on custom kernels (using
> pv-grub).
>
> I'm not sure this can ever work.  My Xen knowledge is small.  Can you
> please confirm that there is a BIOS and a network interface supported
> by gPXE inside the EC2 instance?
>

Good question :-)


> I suspect the guest may be paravirtualized with no BIOS and Xen pv
> devices which gPXE does not support.  In other words, gPXE doesn't
> support Xen's pv architecture (which is different from the regular x86
> architecture).
>

Indeed, it seems pv-grub requires to boot on a kernel with pv-ops enabled.
There is no way to force full virt on EC2 or change anything wrt xen
versions or loader etc.


> Sorry, I don't have time to dig into this but it's a requirement
> before it would even be worth trying to execute the gPXE image.


You've helped a lot already, saving me days of working towards a dead end.
I'll try to setup my own xen server + pv-grub to do testing  in a
controlled environment before going further.

Thanks for the help,

Laurent
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