[ipxe-devel] In order to ooting ESXi mboot.c32 from ipxe enable IMAGE_COMBOOT in general/config.h

[Thomas Glanzmann]

Hello Robin,

> But why do you need to load all of these drivers?

till today I did not spend much thought of it and used always was the
loader on the ESXi ISO used.

> Aren't they bundled in one of the other initrd images you already load?

Probably yes.

> You don't really need to load that many non-standard drivers, do you?

Certainly not.

> I'd suggest try with the minimum amount of modules loaded and see if
> that works for you. Another ESXi user reported that the script I gave as
> an example worked for him (without any additional modules).

I tried that, I had to comment out the line containing 'module
${base-url}weaselin.v00' because that one is no longer contained in the
current ESX 5.0 Update 1 ESX image. And I get the same problem as below.
My assumption that IPXE is wrongly assuming that this is a 'PXE' image
(whatever that actually is) and not a MULTIBOOT image. Do you have a
good version for me so that I can git bisect it?

See also:

iPXE boot script: http://pbot.rmdir.de/bc875a3f7a694f61ee271cf9d193a0db

Syslog output:
Sep  9 15:37:21 esx-01 kernel: esx-01.gmvl.de.gmvl.de ipxe: tboot.b00 : 42118 bytes [PXE] [SELECTED] "ks=http://10.10.10.1/cgi-bin/esxi5.pl"
...

Full: http://pbot.rmdir.de/2dffbce779814119efc071ae12b53a55

> You can also try injecting an "imgstat" command right before the "boot"
> command to see that all of your modules are loaded properly and
> tboot.b00 is actually still set as the image to boot (look for the
> SELECTED tag). But to actually be able to see the entire output you
> would need serial or syslog console enabled. See http://ipxe.org/console
> for more details on that.

Yet another feature I did not know. Find the output here:

http://pbot.rmdir.de/620597615b1fda1ba33320b21e691a38

tboot.b00 has the selected tag but it also has the '[PXE]' tag. That
can't be good, can it? I assume it is wrongly identified as something
that it isn't which is causing the faults. I'm using git HEAD with the
following configuration applied:

http://pbot.rmdir.de/d38dbad5e14b455311a25ae4aa663ed2

Cheers,
        Thomas