Re: PV-Grub and PXE

[Samuel Thibault <samuel.thibault@ens-lyon.org>]

(Sending to xen-devel as it may find volunteers)

Steven Maresca, le Wed 15 Jul 2009 14:33:45 -0400, a écrit :
> While I would be satisfied with a grub menu.lst pulled via tftp, many
> many others would rather rely upon established mechanisms [PXE].

Well, that means two things:

- using the existing PXE payloads. As I said in my previous private
mails, that'd need a PV-bios stubdom for the software interrupt requests
from the PXE payload, but now I think about it again, a PXE loader would
also have to know how to load a PV kernel. This is quite a blocker
actually. Unless porting all the existing PXE payloads, one won't be
able to have them boot PV kernels. Only pv-grub knows at the moment,
so it'd be a bit odd to implement a PV-bios stubdom just to load a PXE
PV-grub, while we could directly start a PV-grub :) FV kernels is not a
problem of course, just boot a FV Xen domain with net boot :)

- using the existing PXE configurations. There are several kinds of
them, quite often pxelinux config, which is like syslinux config.
It may be not be so hard, we'd just need to add e.g. a syslinux
parser in pv-grub. Or port syslinux to PV. That'd mean using just the
configuration part of the existing PXE infrastructures, not its binary
payload.

Samuel