[ipxe-devel] UEFI Boot ISO

[Dean Westhead]

Must admit I hadnt thought of using the iPXE built in menus ...

One thing that I do like about the way I am running iPXE at the moment is that the bootable ISO is tiny and all the menus
are held centrally and so make for easy updates etc.

Can iPXE load a second menu by http from a central server ?

At the moment the BIOS iPXE loads a series of menus and then ultimately it loads the build kernels.... for example :

MENU TITLE Template SLES12_1_JLR

DEFAULT default
TIMEOUT 1
LABEL default
  MENU LABEL default
  KERNEL sles12_1/vmlinuz.SLES12_1_JLR
  APPEND root=/dev/ram0 insecure=1 netwait=45 netsetup=1 load_ramdisk=1 autoyast=http://tcsbuild.jlrint.com/autoyast/sles121 initrd=sles12_1/initrd.SLES12_1_JLR splash=silent showopts ramdisk_size=4096 install=nfs://tcsbuild.jlrint.com/linux_build/sles12_1/CD1 domain="gaydon.jlrint.com whitley.jlrint.com jaguar.ford.com"

I will have a look at the iPXE menus and see if they can do this sort of thing but the main thing is that it can load the menus from a central point .... is that possible ?

Thanks.

Dean.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Christian Hesse" eworm.de>
To: "Dean Westhead" westhead.net>, "ipxe-devel" <ipxe-devel at lists.ipxe.org>
Sent: Thursday, 19 January, 2017 14:42:26
Subject: Re: [ipxe-devel] UEFI Boot ISO

Dean Westhead westhead.net> on Thu, 2017/01/19 14:37:
> Thanks Christian .... not sure how I missed that in your first post !
> 
> Had to install an additional package to the machine too but after doing
> this commit, I can now create a bootable EFI ISO ! It even loads my
> embedded script and connects etc.

Great!

> The last problem I am having is not strictly to do with iPXE so not sure if
> you can advise ....
> 
> On a normal BIOS boot machine, the ISO connects to the network and loads
> pxelinux.0 as a kernel, That in turn loads pxelinux.cfg/default etc.
> 
> I realise that we cant use the pxelinux.0 when booting iPXE in UEFI mode,
> so I have also on the tftp server got the grub2.efi binary which I have
> created using the grub2-mkstandalone command.
> 
> Again the iPXE UEFI boot ISO connects and loads the grub2 binary and drops
> me to the grub2 command prompt. That is my problem ..... for the life of me
> I cant get grub2 to load a default menu no matter where I put it on the
> tftp server !
> 
> Can you offer any advice ?

Is there a reason you want to load another boot loader? iPXE can show a menu
as well. And the extra bonus, which reduces boot latency a lot: iPXE can load
files from http, you do not rely on tftp.
-- 
main(a){char*c=/*    Schoene Gruesse                         */"B?IJj;MEH"
"CX:;",b;for(a/*    Best regards             my address:    */=0;b=c[a++];)
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