[syslinux] Network booting FreeBSD with gpxelinx almost works (fwd)
Daniel Feenberg
feenberg at nber.org
Sun Sep 26 08:50:58 PDT 2010
We have been network booting FreeBSD for some time with pxeboot. But now
we would like to have menu of OSs to boot and got the idea somewhere that
gpxelinux could do that for us. We copied gpxelinux.0 from the
syslinux-4.02 distribution and replaced pxeboot with "gpxelinux" in the
dhcpd.conf file. Indeed with a configuration file in pxelinux.cfg like
this:
default freebsd
label freebsd
PXE pxeboot
and the root path still specified as a DHCP option, FreeBSD 8.1 does boot. If I
replace the first line with:
UI menu.c32
the client does display the menu but if one hits return to select the
single item offered the client merely hangs for a minute, then announces
"boot failure". I am guessing that once the UI is interposed, somehow the
root path isn't getting transmitted to pxeboot. All the other gpxelinux
boot kernels seem to expect the information about the root filesystem to
be specified in the pxelinux.cfg file, rather than in dhcpd.conf. Does
anyone have experience with this? The various web posting I have found
linking FreeBSD to gpxelinux are about installations from ISO files over
the net.
In the syslinux mailing list there is an unanswered posting which is
similar to this:
http://syslinux.zytor.com/archives/2006-February/006582.html
but we do not modify vfs.root.mountfrom, or rename pxeboot.
I found this in the "changes in 3.36:
PXELINUX: Unbreak chainbooting FreeBSD (and possibly others.)
but I haven't found any information about implementing chainbooting
for FreeBSD.
There are a number of web pages showing how to install FreeBSD from an ISO
image over the net - this is not what we want to do. We are currently
using the built-in facilities of FreeBSD to boot over the net and wish to
continue without a major upheaval. Our setup is described at:
http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/FreeBSD-diskless.html
Daniel Feenberg
NBER
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