What's a working BIOS/client-side PXE for Xen/HVM?

[Martin Cracauer]

What do you guys use to bring up HVM installes inside Xen with PXE?




I am tangling with iPXE but it screws up parsing the filename and
root-path options into service/host/filename parts.  After fixing that
for the NFS-mount case I get
http://wavehh.dyndns.org/tmp/debug-xen/nfs.gif
which is generally a hard to debug "broken PXE" problem.

Using FreeBSD's pxeboot compiled with tftp instead of NFS I get further
but root-path is still ignored.  Manually placing all things into
default places not requiring root-path I get
http://wavehh.dyndns.org/tmp/debug-xen/nfs-error.gif
"nfs_diskless: no NFS handle"

According to the source code this means it doesn't have an NFS
handle, specifically boot.nfsroot.nfshandle

I have seen a few people post questions like this to questions@ but no
answer.  I assume this is a chicken-and-egg problem with not having a
root-path at start of the kernel, and this message is printed before
attempting to mount what I specified as root device in loader.conf.


I think it's better for me to look for a working PXE so that I can use
a regular NFS pxeboot, hence the question - anyone got anything
working?

Martin
-- 
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Martin Cracauer <cracauer at cons.org>   http://www.cons.org/cracauer/