Network booting FreeBSD with gpxelinx almost works

[Warren Block]

On Sat, 25 Sep 2010, Daniel Feenberg wrote:

> We have been network booting FreeBSD for some time with pxeboot. So I am 
> confident that we have the dhcpd.conf and the root filesystem sufficient for 
> diskless booting. 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 and 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.

4.01 works, both with menu.c32 and vesamenu.c32.  I can't say I've 
experimented much farther, but used it when writing this:

http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/pxe.html

> 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.

FreeBSD's pxeboot isn't as versatile as others.

> Does anyone have experience with this? FreeBSD isn't mentioned 
> anywhere I can find in the syslinux or gpxelinux documentation, and 
> the various web posting I have found linking FreeBSD to gpxelinux are 
> all about do installations of iso files over the net.

Yes, that's one of the reasons I wrote the article above.