Re: Xen PXE solution

["Andrew D. Ball" <aball@us.ibm.com>]

As far as I know, the boot order option only accepts one of
{'a','b','c'}.  I more descriptive list like you suggested would be
much, much better.

Peace.
Andrew


On Wed, 2006-08-02 at 08:42 -0400, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-07-31 at 10:57 -0400, Andrew D. Ball wrote:
> > I've been asked to work on a PXE solution for booting Xen domU's from a
> > network, and would like some feedback and any help anyone is willing to
> > provide.
> 
> Cool
> 
> > I've been limiting my work to HVM domU's at the moment, because I don't
> > think the NBI's (as far as I know, these are bootloaders) that I have
> > available work in paravirtualized domU's.  Something build around the
> > Linux kernel and kexec would be really cool for paravirtualized domU's.
> 
> HVM is definitely the first step here.  
> 
> > So, I'd like to know if something like the PXE ROM's that come on most
> > servers nowadays would be more useful than doing something like booting
> > from PXE client ISO image.  Ideally, I think the configuration may look
> > something like this:
> 
> *nod*  So are you looking at integrating into the rombios?
> 
> > (device 
> >   (vif
> >     (bridge xenbr0) (mac 00:16:3e:00:00:11) (type ioemu) 
> >     (pxe true)
> >   )
> > )
> 
> Quite possibly PXE would even default to true.
> 
> > Then, I'm thinking the behavior would be to boot PXE on that NIC by
> > default, then try other boot devices.  Of course, the 'boot' option that
> > currently accepts 'a','b', or 'c' could include pxe as an option, but
> > it's unclear to me which order the NICs would try to boot in.  Maybe all
> > of the NICs with PXE ROMs in configuration order.
> 
> I think it's definitely better to go with pxe as an option to boot and
> then doing the NICs in config order.  This matches up with how real
> hardware works[1]
> 
> Jeremy
> 
> [1] Also -- does anyone know if the boot option currently take multiple
> arguments?  I'll have to try when I get to the office.  It should be a
> list and fall back through them as things aren't available so that a
> default order of say PXE, CD, HD can be set up and be nice and useful :)
> 
> 
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