[syslinux] Chainloading pxe boot loaders and dhcp root-path option

[Kjetil.Mikkelborg at kongsberg.com]

Any progress in this rewrite?
I have been watching this list since you announced your work in hope that you might succeed one day :)

--Kjetil

-----Original Message-----
From: syslinux-bounces at zytor.com [mailto:syslinux-bounces at zytor.com] On Behalf Of Gene Cumm
Sent: 17. mai 2011 00:09
To: For discussion of Syslinux and tftp-hpa
Subject: Re: [syslinux] Chainloading pxe boot loaders and dhcp root-path option

On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 16:34, Jeffrey Hutzelman <jhutz at cmu.edu> wrote:
> On Sat, 2011-05-14 at 23:39 -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>> On 05/14/2011 09:14 PM, Matt Fioravante wrote:
>> > Is there anyway to set dynamically set dhcp options when chain
>> > loading another pxe boot loader?
>> >
>> > I'm setting up a pxelinux network install server and one operating
>> > system I want to support is freebsd.
>> >
>> > Freebsd has its own pxe loader called pxeboot that you can use. You
>> > just have to boot it from tftp and set the root-path dhcp option
>> > (option 17) to the location of your nfs server with the kernel and network filesystem.
>> >
>> > I want to support multiple versions of freebsd (i386 and amd64)
>> > along with Linux distros and others. The are hackish ways to
>> > accomplish this using memdisk, but thats not a great idea if you
>> > want to have a 280MB live cd image. The most elegant way I can see
>> > to do this is to chain load freebsd's pxeboot loader from pxelinux.
>> > The problem is when you do this, the dhcp root-path option is not set and defaults to /.
>> >
>> > I need to be able to dynamically change this dhcp option before
>> > chain loading into the next pxe boot loader. Essentiallly, I'd like
>> > to be able to do something like this:
>> >
>> > LABEL fbsd32
>> > pxe pxeboot.0 dhcp-root-path=/nfsserv/freebsd/i386/root
>> >
>> > LABEL fbsd64
>> > pxe pxeboot.0 dhcp-root-path=/nfsserv/freebsd/amd64/root
>> >
>> > Is this at all possible with pxelinux?
>> >
>>
>> This is what pxechain.com does.  This assumes that pxeboot.0 gets the
>> DHCP options from memory and not by doing its own DHCP request.
>
>
> I don't think so.  pxechain.com overwrites the next-server and
> filename fields in the bootp response, but the OP is asking about a
> DHCP option, "root path", which is something different entirely.
> Currently pxechain.com doesn't support modifying DHCP options.  I
> suppose that could be added, but it's probably nontrivial.

pxechain.com asks the PXE stack to reconfigure those.

I did start to get into writing a pxechain.c32 that could do full processing.

--
-Gene

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