[syslinux] SYSLINUX 3.70-pre7: a very special prerelease

H. Peter Anvin hpa at zytor.com
Wed Mar 26 16:41:30 PDT 2008


I have produced a first cut of integrating gPXE with PXELINUX.  This 
builds, in addition to the usual pxelinux.0, an image called gpxelinux.0 
which includes the gPXE network stack.

The result is that one can now download images via (almost) any network 
protocol supported by gPXE, including http.  This lets one do fun things 
like using a CGI or PHP script for the configuration file.

SAN booting (iSCSI or AoE), which is supported by gPXE, can be invoked 
via a small (not yet written) comboot module, which is only necessary in 
order to pass the appropriate command down to gPXE.

Note that currently chainloading other NBPs from gpxelinux.0 is broken. 
  This will be fixed.

In order to invoke the new functionality, you need a filename or 
filename prefix which is a URL, identified by the character sequence. 
In my test setup, I simply use DHCP option 209 (pxelinux.pathprefix) to 
redirect loading to my http server.

Please test it out and holler when (not if) it breaks.

A huge amount of effort has gotten into this, and I would like to thank 
specially Michael Brown of the Etherboot/gPXE project, without whom this 
never would have been possible.

	-hpa




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