[ipxe-devel] ELF32 and ELF64 support in i386 version of ipxe.pxe

[Rendell, Sean]

Hi all,


I have downloaded and compiled ipxe.pxe with serial console, NFS and syslog options enabled, but in my testing, I cannot seem to get a VxWorks image in an ELF 64 bit format to boot.   A VxWorks image with ELF32 boots just fine.  The error message is:  "Could not boot: Invalid Argument (http://ipxe.org/1c838002)".  I used "readelf" to verify the headers of these boot images and prove that they are 32 and 64 bit ELF files and that "file" was not lying to me.

I did get both Sysresccd 32 and 64 bit kernels to boot off the network, but those do not use ELF and they seem to be packaged with a 32 bit "x86 boot sector", so I don't know if this proves that iPXE can support 64 bit, since I would think iPXE "hands off" control, once the boot process has begun.

So, does the 32 bit compiled version of iPXE support loading ELF64?  I tried recompiling iPXE to a 64bit version, hoping that might prove to fix the issue, but keep running into "udivdi3.c .. code model kernel does not support PIC mode".  I am not really a software person other than changing a few config files and doing "make clean; make".  Some of the message lead me to multiboot code, but I am lost as to what is going on there.   I am building on an Intel chip with freshly updated Debian 9.3 (amd64) if that helps.


Cheers,
Sean

Sean Rendell, Member of Technical Staff - Lab Operations