Re: Problems booting Linux via PXE

[Omni Flux <omniflux@omniflux.com>]

I am able to reproduce this with GRUB2 1.97~beta3-1~bpo50+1 from Debian 
backports attempting to boot the current Debian Lenny net installer 
kernels (32-bit and 64-bit) on several machines.

A packet capture shows the tftp server sending block 3 of the kernel 
several times with no response from the client.

This did work with some version of grub2 and the D-I linux kernel in the 
past.

If I can make time, I will try to test with the current version in the 
repository later tonight.

-- 
Omni Flux

On 2010-08-25 13:02, Turner, Ian wrote:
> I’m having some trouble using GRUB to boot Linux via PXE. It seems that
> for some reason the call to the PXE BIOS fails when retrieving the third
> packet of the Linux kernel. I don’t have this problem loading multiboot
> kernels or GRUB modules. This is using GRUB 1.98.
> I’ve seen the problem on all three servers where I’ve tested, which are
> as follows:
> - A Sun Fire X4100
> - with four Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 285 SE
> - Running Intel Boot Agent GE 1.2.50
> Intel Boot Agent PXE Base Code (PXE-2.1 build 086)
> - A Sun Fire X4150
> - with two Intel X5440 processors
> - Running Intel Boot Agent GE 1.2.42
> Intel Boot Agent PXE Base Code (PXE-2.1 build 085)
> - A Dell PowerEdge R610
> - With two Intel X5570 processors
> - Running Broadcom NetXtreme II Ethernet Boot Agent v5.0.5
> Broadcom UNDI PXE-2.1 v5.0.5
> Broadcom Base Code PXE-2.1 v1.1.1
> On the Sun servers, the relevant call to
> grub_pxe_call(GRUB_PXENV_TFTP_READ) at fs/i386/pc/pxe.c:300 simply does
> not return. On the Dell server, some dots (2-200) are printed to the
> console at the time this call is placed, and sometimes the call does
> return, but with a (invalid) status code of 65536. Other times the call
> hangs after printing the dots.
> Looking at loader/i386/linux.c, the grub_file_read() at line 638 works,
> as does the one at line 698. It’s the third read, at line 891, which
> creates the failure.
> I should emphasize that the PXE code seems to work fine for everything
> else. I am able to load dozens of GRUB modules, multiple configuration
> files, and multiboot and linux16 kernels with no problem. It’s only the
> bzImage that seems to create trouble, and only the third packet of that
> image. It doesn’t seem to matter what kernel I use; at least, I see this
> problem with RHEL kernels from 5.2 up to 5.5.
> I hypothesize that something between linux.c line 698 and linux.c line
> 891 writes to a region of memory reserved by the PXE bios. Is there a
> way to test this theory?
> Has anyone else been able to make this work? Is there something simple
> that I am missing? I would love to hear your thoughts. Also, if I should
> take this over to grub-help or grub-bugs, let me know.
> Cheers,
> --Ian Turner
>
>
>
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