[syslinux] PXE Boot Menu with iSCSI and AOE!

H. Peter Anvin hpa at zytor.com
Sun Feb 3 19:10:38 PST 2008


Tomaž Kavcic wrote:
> Dear developer,
> 
> I am working on a project for my graduate work (diploma), which includes iSCSI and AOE booting. I made some menus using pxelinux and things are working fine with linux, but I have a small problem with windows system which require direct iscsi or aoe access.
> I have dhcpd.conf setup that it to each first dhcp request handles out pxelinux.0, then I can chooose from that menu which OS to load. If I choose linux, there's no problem cause each time I can use predefined initrd and kernel which can be both defined directly to pxelinux. The problem appears when I try to access a iscsi or aoe partition directly using gPXE. I can setup pxelinux menu to handle undionly.kpxe (undionly.0) to the client and I also have a string in dhcpd.conf with "option root-path" which is fixed. The problem is with this method I can only setup ONE fided root-path to each client which can't be changed during startup. So if I have root-path defined to boot win2k3 using iscsi, I can only run that OS on that single client. If I want to run another OS on that same client, then I have to edit dhcpd.conf, replace the root-path and restart dhcpd server. After that I can start the client from pxelinux boot menu and new root-path.
> So, my question is, how, if possible, can I solve this problem?
> 

We have some ideas for pretty sophisticated integration between gPXE and 
PXELINUX, however, this is currently stalled due to problems with 
undionly.kpxe in the current gPXE tree (which look like memory 
corruption to me.)

The best thing anyone could do to help this move forward would be to 
help debug these problems.  Once those are there, we should be able to 
put in the additional gPXE/PXELINUX interfaces easily enough.

	-hpa




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