Re: [Qemu-devel] Need a way disable gPXE boot

[Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>]

Hi Ted,

Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> I recently updated to the latest qemu-kvm git tree (commit c04b2ae) and
> I ran into the following problem.  I want to do a direct Linux boot for
> some of my testing work, using the -kernel option.  Apparently the the
> gPXE boot code corrupts something in memory or other CPU state which
> causes the loaded kernel to hang after the gPXE code gives up.  I can
> suppress this using -net none, but of course then I don't have any
> networking access.
>
> I was ultimately able to work around the solution by deleting the
> /usr/local/share/qemu/pxe-*.bin files, but that's a bit of a botch.  It
> would be nice if there was a way to disable the gPXE boot option roms;
> if you know you are booting off of a passed in hard drive image or
> passed in a kernel for a direct boot, there's no reason why we might
> want to do a gPXE boot.
>
> It would be nice if there was a way to disable option roms automatically
> if -kernel is specified, or if -boot order doesn't include 'n', or
> perhaps with an explicit option to suppress all boot option roms (or all
> networking options).
>
> What sort of approach would be considered acceptable?  Did I miss
> some way of making the right thing happen other than deleting the
> installed pxe-*.bin files?
>   

We just did a flag day and switched our PXE rom and BIOS.  We've 
encountered a few regressions and we're quickly fixing them.

Alex Graf has already fixed the problem you describe above properly and 
I've merged that into upstream qemu.  It will take a little bit of time 
for Avi and/or Marcelo to sync those changes into qemu-kvm.

For now, using '-bios pcbios.bin' should be a reasonable work around.

Regards,

Anthony Liguori