[syslinux] Loading Xen with PXELinux

Bret Mckee bretm at boneheads.us
Sat Jul 17 09:21:06 PDT 2004


Greetings:

[ First, apologies if this has been discussed before. I looked through
about the last year's worth of archives, but couldn't find a "Search
feature", so I used the visual grep method, which is not foolproof.  I
also tried to download the full text of the archives to use the real
grep, but I got an error loading it... ]

I'm working on setting up the Xen virtual machine system from
Cambridge to boot using PXE.  Unfortunately, it requires 3 images to
be loaded (xen, linux, initrd) and I can't find any mention of doing
this with PXELINUX, and the only people I have found who have made it
work are using pxegrub (with kernel=, module=, initrd=).
Unfortunately, pxegrub  doesn't support the NIC I have (I still don't
understand why it needs NIC drivers when PXE is available, but that is
a different issue :-)

So, I seems I have 3 obvious choices:
	0. discover that I'm wrong and that PXELINUX will load 3
images
	1. try to add grub like module= support to PXELINUX
	2. try to add either PXE or NIC support for my nice to pxegrub
	3. do something creative

Naturally #0 would be best, but I don't think it is true.

Since I'm basically lazy, I'm liking #3.  I was thinking I might be
able to use MEMDISK to do this by creating a MEMDISK image that
contains the 3 Xen binaries + enough of GRUB to load them from the
MEMDISK.  I was wondering if anyone knew of a reason why this wouldn't
work before I tried to get it to work.

Thanks for the great toolset,

Bret
	






More information about the Syslinux mailing list