[syslinux] gpxelinux questions

[H. Peter Anvin]

On 09/03/2009 03:19 PM, Doug Scoular wrote:
> Hi All,
> I've been enjoying playing with gpxe and gpxelinux, however I have a
> few questions that I'd love to get some answers for...
> 
> 1) Will gpxelinux support chain loading of other NBPs without hanging
> or is this already resolved ?

Not yet; it requires changes in the gPXE code which haven't happened yet
(I have experimented with it, but nothing productizable yet.)

> 2) Why does gpxelinux take much longer than pxelinux to enumerate the
> UUID, MAC address, then hex IP address chop ?

No idea (except for the additional DHCP)... it shouldn't take any longer
in the same configuration.

> 3) Can gpxelinux load gpxe scripts at all.

Not out of the box, but it would be easy to create a version of the
sanboot.c32 module which executed an arbitrary gPXE command.

> 4) How does gpxelinux really work, It looks like a gpxelinux is a
> slightly modified version of gpxe which simply executes pxelinux.0 as
> it's default gpxe script:
> 
> #!gpxe
> dhcp net0
> imgload pxelinux.0
> boot pxelinux.0

Correct.

> Does pxelinux.0 detect that it's been invoked by gpxelinux.0 and
> enable the HTTP, FTP, NFS, iSCSI and AOE code ?

Yes.  This code will also work if invoked on top of gPXE without it
being part of gpxelinux.0.

> Sorry for all the questions, but I couldn't find much info out there
> on the wiki.

	-hpa