[ipxe-devel] appnote/debian_preseed instructions are wrong

[Etienne Champetier]

Le mer. 12 août 2020 à 17:04, Christian Nilsson <nikize at gmail.com> a écrit :
>
> On Wed, 12 Aug 2020, 14:55 Etienne Champetier, <champetier.etienne at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Christian,
>>
>> Le mer. 12 août 2020 à 14:42, Christian Nilsson <nikize at gmail.com> a écrit :
>> >
>> > On Wed, 12 Aug 2020, 13:30 Michael Brown, <mcb30 at ipxe.org> wrote:
>> >>
>> >> On 12/08/2020 08:50, Etienne Champetier wrote:
>> >> >>> The automagical construction of CPIO archives is indeed for legacy BIOS
>> >> >>> only.  On UEFI, we provide the kernel with a virtual filesystem from
>> >> >>> which it can load arbitrary files without needing a CPIO wrapper.
>> >> >
>> >> > Do you have a working exemple (maybe I need a special path) ?
>> >> > Does it need a recent kernel ? (I think I did my tests with CentOS 7 kernel)
>> >> > Does it need a specific ipxe compile option ?
>> >>
>> >> No specific iPXE compile option.  Any kernel built with CONFIG_EFI_STUB
>> >> should work, which includes all current distro kernels as far as I know.
>> >>
>> >> Any image downloaded by iPXE will be available within the virtual
>> >> filesystem using the filename as shown by "imgstat".  Linux can access
>> >> these files using the initrd= kernel command-line argument.
>> >>
>> >> In the most simple example, something like:
>> >>
>> >>    #!ipxe
>> >>    kernel http://boot.ipxe.org/demo/vmlinuz initrd=initrd.img
>> >>    initrd http://boot.ipxe.org/demo/initrd.img
>> >>    boot
>> >>
>> >>  From memory, the initrd= option supports a comma-separated list.  I
>> >> can't immediately find documentation to support this, though.
>> >>
>> >> Michael
>> >>
>> >> If one wants to add a extra configuration file as well, the extra cpio header needs to be added to that file to work in efi mode.
>>
>> So you confirm that what is explained at
>> https://ipxe.org/appnote/debian_preseed is not working anymore ?
>
> It works fine in pcbios mode
> For EFI it needs tweaks, and that is to add cpio header to the file in a separate step.
> Which also works in pcbios mode.

Thanks

This confirm previous link is wrong and need fixing
"ipxe loads debian/linux recognises it as efi stores it in memory with
the command line, then loads debian/initrd.gz names it one.gz and
stores it in memory, loads debian/preseed.cfg names it pressed.cfg and
puts it in a cpio archive called two"