[syslinux] Network booting FreeBSD with gpxelinx almost works (fwd)

[Gene Cumm]

On Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 11:50, Daniel Feenberg <feenberg at nber.org> wrote:
>
> 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.

This sounds like it's an issue specific to menu.c32 and the kernel
type PXE.  Have you tried creating a copy of pxeboot as pxeboot.0?
If, somehow, menu.c32 is messing up and using the file extension as
the kernel type or not passing the kernel type parameter properly,
this might be an interim solution until another solution is found.

-- 
-Gene