[syslinux] pxechain.com and gpxelinux.0 odd behavior

[Gene Cumm]

On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 7:21 PM, Hans Lellelid <hans at velum.net> wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 7:15 PM, H. Peter Anvin <hpa at zytor.com> wrote:
>
>> On 08/08/2013 04:14 PM, Hans Lellelid wrote:
>> >
>> > Sorry, I will give some better output tomorrow.  I think when this
>> > happened I was still using menu.c32 so I didn't see any output, it just
>> > reloaded the menu.  But I will respond back tomorrow after trying this
>> > with more scientific rigour.  I might be able to do the packet trace,
>> > though that may be a little tricky to orchestrate since these are all
>> > ESXi VMs.
>> >
>>
>> Oh, that's important.  VMwares PXE stack sucks big time.
>>
>
> That doesn't surprise me, but it's unfortunately what I have to work with.
>  I'm sure I'll get something figured out.  I figure worst-case I could
> compile custom gpxelinux.0 for each of the various (3) servers (i.e. with
> the gpxe script to forward to that URL)  that I am trying to chainload from
> the first pxe server and try that out; I don't know if that stands a better
> chance of working, but I suppose if the problem is specific to pxechn.c32
> it might?  I freely admit to only having a basic understanding of what's
> going on here.

1) I've actually had pretty decent luck with the VMware PXE stack on
some platforms, including pushing 17+MB/s with another version of
lpxelinux.0 and fetching 90+MiB initrd files.

2) I've generally has better luck loading pxelinux.0 first then gpxelinux.0.

3) Why not use the CONFIG directive/config.c32?  modules that need to
be at different versions?

-- 
-Gene