[ipxe-devel] building for use virtualbox

[Warren Turkal]

Is it possible that my rom is being built with support for all nics? If so,
how do I remove support for all but the nic I care about (virtio-net or
8086100e e1000 in my case).

Thanks,
wt


On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 4:45 AM, Robin Smidsrød <robin at smidsrod.no> wrote:

> On 28.01.2013 17:01, Klaus Espenlaub wrote:
> >
> > Actually it's not really intentional that VirtualBox ships iPXE, because
> > the "switch to iPXE" project isn't complete yet. The intended "free" PXE
> > ROM in the VirtualBox base package would be some reasonably dated
> > Etherboot (derived from "almost" 5.4.3). Seems to have slipped into
> > 4.2.0 :)
>
> Interesting to hear. I noticed that there was a gpxe subdir in the vbox
> source code, but it wasn't really the one that was part of the binary
> build you can download. Let's hope this is settled soon, so that the
> source code and the binary build matches.
>
> > Telling VirtualBox to use a different PXE ROM is quite easy, you just
> > have to make sure that the ROM image meets the size requirements. 56KB
> > max (to spell it out: 57344 bytes), anything bigger will be silently
> > ignored and the internal fallback will kick in again.
> >
> > You have to be rather selective with the features, otherwise it won't
> > fit. It's so easy to pick too many iPXE features :)
>
> Are you able to build one ROM file that supports all the NICs vbox
> supports? I currently build intel--virtio-net--pcnet32.dsk and boot
> using a floppy to get support for all the hardware. That is obviously
> not the best solution.
>
> I also tried building bin/10222000.rom, bin/1af41000.rom and
> bin/8086100e.rom, but I'm not sure if it is possible to combine them all
> together and still get below the 56KB limit. That would make it so much
> easier than having to twiddle the NIC ROM for each VM based on what
> network card is configured. Then I could just replace the global PXE ROM
> and be done with it. The non-free Intel PXE ROM works well, but it only
> supports the Intel adapter, as far as I can tell. Would be nice to have
> PXE support for the others as well.
>
> It would be super-helpful if you could post the config used to build the
> vbox-bundled iPXE ROM. I assume you have access to it, considering you
> work at Oracle...
>
> -- Robin
>
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-- 
*Warren Turkal*
Site Reliability Engineer |
wt at ooyala.com | 650-961-3400
www.ooyala.com | blog <http://www.ooyala.com/blog> |
@ooyala<http://www.twitter.com/ooyala>
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