[ipxe-devel] Problem with later versions of iPXE and WinPE/memdisk

[Lindgren Daniel]

Hi all.

For a couple of years I've been using iPXE in combination with PXELINUX
to get HTTP transfers and dynamic selection of closest TFTP/HTTP-server.

Basically I download Syslinux, get iPXE from git and use an edited
version of the Makefile for gpxe included in Syslinux to build
ipxelinux.0.

I compiled ipxelinux.0 on November 9th 2011 with Syslinux 4.04 and iPXE
from git. The last entry in git log is this:

---

commit be90241ec292ba561562827b2685d2881bc92b5e
Author: Marin Hannache <mareo at mareo.fr>
Date:   Wed Nov 2 00:22:00 2011 +0000

    [getopt] Accept "--" as an end-of-options marker

    Signed-off-by: Michael Brown <mcb30 at ipxe.org>

---

Everything works as it should and I haven't had any reason to build a
newer version since then. In the last year there have been two releases
of Syslinux, today I decided to build ipxelinux.0 from a current version
of both iPXE and Syslinux (4.06), just to try a current version in case
the old version has problems with new hardware (or updated BIOS
versions), which has happened before.

There seems to be a problem booting WinPE (ISO, using memdisk) on Dell
Latitude E4310 and HP EliteBook 2530p, WinPE starts to boot and then
hangs at "Starting Windows".

I've done some troubleshooting and this is what I've come up with:

Syslinux 4.04 + iPXE from current git = WinPE hangs.
Syslinux 4.06 + iPXE from current git = WinPE hangs.
Syslinux 4.04 + iPXE from git as of November 9th 2011 = WinPE boots OK.
Syslinux 4.06 + iPXE from git as of November 9th 2011 = WinPE boots OK.

Looks like the problem is caused by changes in iPXE, not Syslinux. I
realize that there's been a ton of changes since November 2011, but does
anyone have an idea as to what might be the cause of the problem?

We have built our PXE infrastructure around PXELINUX menus, the new
wimboot functionality in iPXE is not an alternative for us at the
moment.

Cheers,
Daniel
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