[syslinux] load pxelinux w/o PXE BIOS?

[prl-syslinux at sychron.com]

> I would like to load pxelinux as a second stage bootloader from a machine
> which does not have a PXE BIOS (namely, from a VMware guest machine) in
> order to perform an automated Linux installation. A boot floppy would
> be nice. It seems that there are some commercial solutions around but
> is there someting in the OSS arena?  I've been googling for it for some
> time but no luck.

pxelinux needs PXE; by definiton you need a PXE BIOS to run it or any
other PXE NBP (PXE jargon for the 2ary loader); it must reside somewhere
accessible before the OS boot and have a driver for your (maybe virtual)
NIC.

The only existing open source PXE layers I am aware of are: NILO based
on OSkit; this could boot from a floppy (but I believe the project has
died) and some work done on etherboot which apparently resulted in a
minimal PXE subset specifically to support FreeBSD, but which never made
the big time. A (finished) PXE layer on top of Etherboot is being
actively discussed on the etherboot-developers list and seems quite
likely to happen soon; the converse (Etherboot-on-PXE, i.e. Etherboot
chained as a NBP and with a driver for PXE UNDI) is now being tested.
PXE-on-Etherboot would not export the full PXE API, but enough to
support the common NBPs. pxelinux would probably be the first target.

> Yes I could also use etherboot/netboot (w/o pxelinux) but the point is I
> have a install server environment which does work just fine, and would
> like to use VMware GSX as a demo setup on my laptop. This should be as
> much as the live setup as possible.

Well, Etherboot and pxelinux configs can live side by side on a single
dhcp server quite happily (use the REQUIRE_VCI_ETHERBOOT build option on
rom-omatic), so you could swallow your pride and set up with Etherboot
in the first instance until PXE-on-Etherboot comes along.