[ipxe-devel] iSCSI boot problem

[Michael Brown]

On Saturday 05 Mar 2011 21:49:56 Hsuan-Yeh Chang wrote:
> Matthew Walster <matthew at walster.org> wrote:
> > Perhaps I'm being a little naïve, but wouldn't that try and boot from
> > the local loopback - surely you need a valid hostname or IP, i.e.:
> >
> > iscsi:myhostname::::iqn.2007-08.localhost:iscsiboot
>
> My host machine is running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, but Virtualbox appears to boot
> Fedora 14, which is installed in the iSCSI target.  So, I believe that iPXE
> has fetched the correct iSCSI target, but for some reasons fails to boot
> correctly...

iPXE doesn't actually recognise "localhost" as meaning 127.0.0.1, and will 
attempt a DNS lookup on the name.  I'm not sure how your DNS server is 
configured, but it must somehow be returning a non-127.0.0.1 IP address for 
"localhost".

I agree that iPXE must be connecting to an iSCSI target, since it's definitely 
loading something, and since I think you have only one iSCSI target then it 
must indeed be connecting to the correct iSCSI target.  However, it might be a 
good idea to change "iscsi:localhost:..." to something saner, e.g. 
"iscsi:192.168.1.4:..." (or whatever the IP address or DNS name of the target 
really is).

That aside, with regard to the problem you are seeing:

> Virtualbox appears to have found and loaded the iSCSI target, but after a
>  few seconds virtualbox shows: "Unable to locate IOAPIC." (see attached
>  screenshot for more detail).  Then, virtualbox shows:  "No root device
>  found" and "Boot has failed, sleeping forever."

It sounds as though you are successfully loading the Fedora kernel from the 
iSCSI target.  The "Unable to locate IOAPIC" messages are coming from the 
loaded kernel, and seem to be harmless according to this thread:

  http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/showthread.php?t=256241

The problem seems to be that Fedora has either failed to connect to the iSCSI 
target, or connected to the target but failed to mount the root partition.  
iPXE has done its part; there's no more iPXE debugging to be done.

You probably need to see some more verbose boot messages from Fedora to help 
figure out the problem.  Assuming you're using grub, try removing the word 
"quiet" from the kernel command line before allowing it to boot.

Michael