[syslinux] PXELINUX, pxechain.com and Etherboot

[Michael Brown]

On Wednesday 13 May 2009 22:19:17 Joyce Yu wrote:
> I think that I told you earlier. gPXE doesn't work with Solaris. I need 
> to use something that can load Solaris at least. I tried a few gPXE
> supported NICs. None of them can load Solaris. Clay has done some
> analysis. Attached his old email to you. If gPXE can load Solaris, I
> will definitely use gPXE.

I believe that the only two relevant issues mentioned in that e-mail are the 
lack of native gunzip support and the command line stripping argv[0].  The 
latter is on my current todo list, the former will probably never be included 
(see recent discussion on etherboot-developers), but the really *important* 
point is that *Etherboot* *5.4* *does* *not* *provide* *these* *features*.

If you are managing to load a gzipped multiboot kernel using Etherboot, then 
you *must* be using some additional software such as pxelinux.  This software 
will work just as well or better with gPXE in place of Etherboot 5.4.

There is, as far as I can tell from what you say, absolutely *no* technical 
reason for you to be using Etherboot 5.4.

For the record, you will probably get best results using gPXE with syslinux's 
mboot.c32, which I believe supports gzipped multiboot kernels.

Michael