[ipxe-devel] ipxe vs gpxe

[Michael Brown]

Yadin Flammer <yxf4 at psu.edu> wrote:

>In addition to my last email, I actually created an ipxe CD to compare 
>it to gpxe and found that ipxe doesn't work where gpxe works great. 
>The 
>first issue is that ipxe looks at various network devices in the wrong 
>order, so it has to time out on wireless before going ahead on 
>ethernet.  gpxe goes straight to ethernet so it starts much faster.  
>Once you choose a PXE image to boot from, ipxe is unable to actually 
>boot, it can't download the image and never progresses.  gpxe instantly
>
>pulls it and starts the boot process.
>
>All around it so far seems ipxe has a lot of issues and is not 
>functional compared to it's predecessor.  Since ipxe doesn't seem to 
>work at all, I continue to wonder about a way to get gpxe onto USB as a
>
>bootable media from the ISO.
>
>Any advice is appreciated.

You may continue to wonder how to fix gPXE if you so wish; it's about as productive as trying to fix bugs in Linux kernel 2.2.

It sounds as though iPXE supports a wireless NIC in your system which wasn't supported by gPXE.  Working around this unwanted extra functionality is trivial: you can omit the wireless driver from the build (or use an embedded script to boot from your desired NIC first, if you still want the option of using the wireless NIC).

What are you actually trying to boot, and what exactly happens?  Your message is full of complaints, but very short on actual information that might help to resolve your problem.

Michael