[syslinux] memdisk and iso

[Gene Cumm]

On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 1:33 PM, upen <upendra.gandhi at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> I am trying to boot a server via PXE with following configured for its PXE.
>
> LABEL IMP
> MENU LABEL IMP
> LINUX memdisk
> INITRD linuxIso.iso
> APPEND iso
>
> I haven't been able to get this work, probably only because of network
> speed. PXE server is on RHEL 5.8 and syslinux 5.x
>
> While I was booting the server, I ran dstat on PXE server and saw the
> outgoing network speed was 400-500Bytes. So looks like there is limitation
> on speed via TFTP.
>
> I am wondering if there is any way I can modify parameters to transfer it
> via NFS ? ISO is about 700MB. I have NFS services running on PXE that use
> for kickstarting redhat machines.
>
> Thanks.

A general idea is to load the kernel and an appropriate initrd via
TFTP with appropriate parameters passed to the kernel such that
something within the initrd can use those parameters to reach via
another protocol like NFS to the ISO.

Using memdisk in this way, you'll want HTTP/FTP transfer and probably
2 GiB of RAM to run.  This would also require that the initrd knows
that the ISO is in RAM and to use something like memdiskfind to find
it.

--
-Gene