[syslinux] gpxelinux local disk boot does not work

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

--On Wednesday, July 21, 2010 11:56:21 AM -0600 Jeff Sadowski 
<jeff.sadowski at gmail.com> wrote:

> With this setup it stalls when I type "test" at the pxelinux.0 prompt
> its the same box and pxelinux.0 was downloaded through tftp
> successfully each and every time

It stops without printing anything at all?
Unfortunately, the version of pxechain in syslinux doesn't print a version 
string at startup, so it's difficult to tell in a non-debugging version 
whether it actually loaded successfully.  I probably should push that 
change at some point.

> With this setup when I type "test" at the pxelinux.0 prompt
> it displays as follows
> [quote]
> TFTP boot: 10.255.11.252 pxelinux.cfg/gpxelinux.0
> pxechain: PXENV_RESTART_TFTP [0001]
> pxechain: PXENV_UDP_OPEN [0001]
> boot:
> [/quote]

Right, so those messages from pxechain indicate that its calls to your PXE 
stack are failing.  The first message indicates that pxechain failed to get 
the PXE stack to download and transfer control to the new NBP 
(gpxelinux.0), and the second indicates that it failed to reopen the UDP 
interface before returning control to syslinux.  The error code 0x0001 
returned in each case is PXENV_STATUS_FAILURE, which is fairly generic and 
useless.

At this point you are still in the _original_ pxelinux.0, not in 
gpxelinux.0, and since the UDP interface is not open, anything that 
requires reading a file out of the syslinux configuration filesystem will 
fail.


If you can build syslinux from source, I'd appreciate your trying a 
debugging version of pxechain.com.  This will produce some additional 
output which, if quoted exactly, may help figure out what is going on. 
Just uncomment the '%define DEBUG' at the top of modules/pxechain.asm (it 
may also work to add 'NASMOPTS+=-DDEBUG' to the make command line, but I 
haven't tested that and don't know what effect it might have on other 
components).

-- Jeff