[syslinux] Availability of a variable of the TFTP server IPaddressto be used in pxelinux.cfg/default

Miller, Shao Shao.Miller at yrdsb.edu.on.ca
Fri Mar 26 04:50:41 PDT 2010


Good day Michael,

In regards to your challenge of passing the boot-server info on to Linux
from PXELINUX:

Items passed with the APPEND directive are available to Linux at
/proc/cmdline .  /proc/ should be mounted at some point during Linux'
startup processes.  IPAPPEND will add to what you find there.

I've seen communications from H. Peter Anvin expressing an interest in
supporting variables in Syslinux.  It isn't implemented at this time.

For some folks booting Linux, their Linux will itself perform another
DHCP transaction...  If you can use a Linux DHCP client to gain access
to the boot-server information, that's another way your Linux can find
out the boot server.

An initramfs "initrd" can be extracted into a directory.  You can modify
the files and directory structure, then rebuild it.  See
linux/Documentation/filesystems/ramfs-rootfs-initramfs.txt for more
information there.

If you are customizing Linux distributions to be PXE-bootable, I'm under
the impression you'd have to customize each new release anyway.  If
that's not the case, you might check to see if the distribution's
author/vendor/distributor already has a preferred, network-bootable
flavour.  If so, you might be able to determine how they make use of the
boot-server IP information.

- Shao Miller




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