[ipxe-devel] cpio on the fly generation breaks for large images

[Steven Dick]

I'm trying to use ipxe with wimboot to load multiple images, and it seems
to break right around the 320M mark.

I looked at the source for wimboot and realized it wants its multiple files
in cpio format, so I figured out how to bundle them myself and then load
the cpio image using syslinux instead of ipxe, and this works.

It was suggested on the ipxe forum that I try to load the same cpio image
using ipxe directly to see if the on the fly cpio image generation was
broken, but it seems that it breaks there too.

I suspect that there is something wrong with ipxe's memory management that
syslinux gets right for images larger than 320M.  The result is that an
image that wimboot+syslinux loads fine gets corrupted (and gives the
windows white error screen) when loaded with ipxe.

I've got a handful of test machines I need to run this through tomorrow
morning to see if it is specific to something in the hardware of this one
machine or if it is something peculiar with images between 320 and 340M in
size.   I'm open to suggestions for collecting debug information on this.
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