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

[a178235]

This is a great idea. In an earlier post I wrote “I use gPXE in the process so I can support iSCSI and HTTP for booting.” While PXE loaded gPXE and in turn loaded pxelinux.0, PXELinux failed to load pxelinux.cfg/default from the web server and it look a long time searching for each configuration file. Here are some more thoughts I had on this scenario. Can PXELinux be made to work separately from gPXE, in that gPXE would be in ROM and load pxelinux.0 from a web server? Currently gPXE does not seem to resolve DNS queries correctly anyway. Having an integrated gPXELinux is not a bad idea, but what NIC drivers are incorporated into gPXELinux? gpxe:all-drivers, undi:*, etc.?
  It would be nice to burn gPXE or gPXELinux into ROM and be able to kick start an OSD from the ROM command line over the Internet via HTTP. Several other things would need to be considered such as using DNS service records that would contain boot file information as DHCP currently does. This would allow specifying http://contoso.com from the gPXE command line and the DNS server at contoso.com serving a boot file or configuration file URL.
  Use the following scenario: Boot the computer and specify http://www.ubuntu.com at the gPXE command prompt as the boot location. This in turn eventually loads a GFXBoot/VESAMenu allowing for a Ubuntu installation, etc.
  Some final thoughts; at some time you will probably be faced with EFI integration, i.e. an EFI version.

"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa at zytor.com> wrote:
  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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