Re: Xen PXE solution

[Ben Thomas <bthomas@virtualiron.com>]

Hi Henning,

It's been a little while, and my recollection is rusty.  I do
know that we ended up fixing some opcode emulation when
getting the PXE booting to work.  I was pretty sure that we
had posted that to the xen-devel list, but again I plead
a faulty memory on the specifics.

I do know that we are constantly (hundreds to thousands of
times per day) booting many, many xen-based systems via PXE
for both VMX and SVM systems. Currently, we're using the
pcnet32 support.  As Ian will (or probably already did) point
out, it's probably worthwhile to move forward.

I'd be happy to give you more specifics on what we're doing
to get PXE booted.  I doubt that the entire list cares, so
please send me an email if you're interested.

-b


Henning Sprang wrote:
> Hi  Ben,
> 
> On 8/1/06, Ben Thomas <ben@virtualiron.com> wrote:
> 
>> [...]
>>  For what it's worth, we've been using a PXE solution based upon 
>> etherboot.
>> It's effectively a floppy-like boot image that works quite well.  My 
>> memory
>> is that there were some instruction decode/emulation issues on VMX, 
>> but that
>> we've submitted all of those patches to this list. I believe that they 
>> were
>> incorporated into xen-unstable.
> 
> 
> This is probably more for the xen-users list, but here is the only
> post I found about somebody doing etherboot with xen hvm, which I am
> trying currently without luck.
> Does your mail mean that with xen-testing at the moment my efforts to
> try booting xen hvm with an etherboot image and pxe cannot succeed?
> 
> When booting from the etherboot iso, I get
> "Loading pcnet32.zli....Ready"
> 
> but no dhcp requests or anything happens.  xm dmesg's last lines are:
> 
> (XEN) (GUEST: 60) Booting from CD-Rom...
> (XEN) (GUEST: 60) Unknown opcode at 0F60:0E8A=0x1048A
> (XEN) (GUEST: 60) Halt called from %eip 0xD39D1
> 
> No interesting info xend-debug.log
> 
> I'd be a candidate for testing xen pxe solutions, because I really
> want to use it.
> 
> Henning


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