[ipxe-devel] Loading large initrd images without iPXE rebooting or error 2a818006

[Alex Davies]

Hi,

I have been using iPXE now for just a few weeks and I thought it was
aewsome. Today I see the new menu stuff. Great stuff guys, thank you!

I am building a large initrd image (based on a Live CD) [i.e. we are not
having a small initrd+NFS/SAN root device]. It seems that if this initrd
gets larger than about 800M we see some interesting behaviour:

   - If the ipxe script is kernel/initrd/boot, the server reboots
   immediately and before the kernel has a chance to execute
   - If the ipxe script is initd/chain, we get error
   http://ipxe.org/err/2a818006

Digging into this shows (I think) that iPXE is hitting the
function bzimage_exec in i386/image/bzimage.c. We are using undionly.kpxe,
chain loaded from a legacy TFTP server and with a embedded configuration
(make bin/undionly.kpxe EMBED=xx.ipxe). I can see that this is using the 32
bit arch libraries; it it possible to build a 64 bit version of
unidonly.kpxe that can address all the system memory?

Failing that, is anybody else booting large initrd images successfully with
iPXE?

Thanks,

Alex
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