[Qemu-devel] proposal : use gpxe roms in upstream qemu

[Qemu-devel] proposal : use gpxe roms in upstream qemu

[Glauber Costa]

Hi people,

For a while now, we are using gpxe instead of etherboot in fedora's qemu, with strong success.
etherboot is currently deprecated, and gpxe offers a lot of interesting features, like iscsi
initiator support, besides being actively maintained. I even think with some effort we may be
able to get rid of extboot by using gpxe infrastructure to initiate virtio disks.

I propose we do the same in upstream qemu. To properly use it, there are a number of qemu, bochs bios
and kernel (in kvm case) fixes needed. But they are fairly old at this point in time, and had more than
enough time to spread around.

I've put the roms we are using in http://glommer.net/gpxe if people want to test it. They are built
from gpxe 0.9.7 without any patches, so it should be very very straightforward to reproduce. One can
also grab .rom files from rom-o-matic.net

Re: [Qemu-devel] proposal : use gpxe roms in upstream qemu

[Anthony Liguori]

Glauber Costa wrote:
> Hi people,
>
> For a while now, we are using gpxe instead of etherboot in fedora's qemu, with strong success.
> etherboot is currently deprecated, and gpxe offers a lot of interesting features, like iscsi
> initiator support, besides being actively maintained. I even think with some effort we may be
> able to get rid of extboot by using gpxe infrastructure to initiate virtio disks.
>
> I propose we do the same in upstream qemu. To properly use it, there are a number of qemu, bochs bios
> and kernel (in kvm case) fixes needed. But they are fairly old at this point in time, and had more than
> enough time to spread around.
>
> I've put the roms we are using in http://glommer.net/gpxe if people want to test it. They are built
> from gpxe 0.9.7 without any patches, so it should be very very straightforward to reproduce. One can
> also grab .rom files from rom-o-matic.net
>   

One problem with this is that gpxe does not work with the builtin tftp 
server.  If I do:

x86_64-softmmu/qemu-system-x86_64 -hda ~/imag/linux.img -snapshot -L 
~/git/qemu/pc-bios -boot n -bootp /pxelinux.0 -tftp /tftpboot

I get a tftp server does not support tsize option.


Regards,

Anthony Liguori

RE: [Qemu-devel] proposal : use gpxe roms in upstream qemu

[Laurent Vivier]

>Hi people,
>
>For a while now, we are using gpxe instead of etherboot in fedora's qemu, with 
>strong success.
>etherboot is currently deprecated, and gpxe offers a lot of interesting 
>features, like iscsi
>initiator support, besides being actively maintained. I even think with some 
>effort we may be
>able to get rid of extboot by using gpxe infrastructure to initiate virtio 
>disks.

To boot from a virtio-disk with gPXE you can use my (old) patches:

http://markmail.org/message/qxqvcrzqitpzrsnb

This series of patches adds block device boot support.

The goal is to use gPXE to boot from a virtio-blk device.

This series has been modified to work with Bochs BIOS with/without BCV or PnP  support.

[PATCH 1/4] Move romprefix generic part from arch/i386/prefix/romprefix.S to arch/i386/prefix/libromprefix.S 
[PATCH 2/4] Add block device boot support 
[PATCH 3/4] Add virtio-blk driver 
[PATCH 4/4] cdrom boot support 

Regards,
Laurent
-- 
--------------------- Laurent@vivier.eu  ---------------------
"Tout ce qui est impossible reste à accomplir"    Jules Verne
"Things are only impossible until they're not" Jean-Luc Picard

Re: [Qemu-devel] proposal : use gpxe roms in upstream qemu

[Glauber Costa]

On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 10:35:28AM +0200, Laurent Vivier wrote:
> >Hi people,
> >
> >For a while now, we are using gpxe instead of etherboot in fedora's qemu, with 
> >strong success.
> >etherboot is currently deprecated, and gpxe offers a lot of interesting 
> >features, like iscsi
> >initiator support, besides being actively maintained. I even think with some 
> >effort we may be
> >able to get rid of extboot by using gpxe infrastructure to initiate virtio 
> >disks.
> 
> To boot from a virtio-disk with gPXE you can use my (old) patches:
> 
> http://markmail.org/message/qxqvcrzqitpzrsnb
> 
> This series of patches adds block device boot support.
> 
> The goal is to use gPXE to boot from a virtio-blk device.
> 
> This series has been modified to work with Bochs BIOS with/without BCV or PnP  support.
Any reason for those patches not being merged?