Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH v2 0/3] pc-bios: Use iPXE ROMs

[Stefan Hajnoczi <stefanha@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 9:10 PM, Alex Williamson
<alex.williamson@redhat.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2011-04-11 at 13:57 -0600, Alex Williamson wrote:
>> On Mon, 2011-04-11 at 14:48 -0500, Anthony Liguori wrote:
>> > On 04/11/2011 02:35 PM, Alex Williamson wrote:
>> > > This series replaces our current gPXE based PXE ROMs with iPXE
>> > > versions from the iPXE project (http://ipxe.org).  This version
>> > > adds ipxe to our submodules so it can be easily included in
>> > > releases.  I'm still including a script for updating these,
>> > > perhaps someone better with Makefiles can eventually adopt this
>> > > to a build target.
>> > >
>> > > This email series is mainly for reference, there's too much
>> > > renaming and replacing binary files to send out to the mailing
>> > > list.  I'll strip out the binaries here so the rest can be
>> > > reviewed.  For the real code, please pull:
>> > >
>> > > git://github.com/awilliam/qemu.git (ipxe branch)
>> > >
>> > > Thanks to Anthony for already setting up an ipxe mirror.
>> > > Thanks,
>> >
>> > Looks good to me.  How different is this from what we've been shipping?
>> > Have you tested PXE boot from the builtin TFTP server and from an
>> > external one (like dnsmasq)?
>>
>> We were shipping v0.9.9, which was tagged 10/2009.  There's been a gpxe
>> v1.0.0 release since then, plus the split between ipxe and gpxe.  I
>> think Michael is hoping to have a release soon, but the code feels
>> pretty stable to me as is.
>>
>> I've tested external booting from dhcp/tftp server for all the NICs.
>> I'll make a pass through testing with the builtin server and report
>> back.  Thanks,
>
> Check, tested virtio-net-pci, e1000, rtl8139, ne2k_pci, pcnet, and
> i82550 using builtin server, with bootfile and tftp loaded
> kernel/initrd.  All work.  Thanks,

Whenever QEMU wants to merge a new iPXE build it would be nice to run
the tests that Alex performed, plus:
 * PXELINUX (to test the PXE interface)
 * undionly.kpxe (to test the UNDI interface)

It's fairly easy to do using the builtin DHCP/TFTP servers, but not
that hard with dnsmasq either.  The guest could be a Linux kernel and
initramfs that boots and writes "PASS" to the serial port (or over a
TCP connection).  We can launch this with a timeout to catch failures
or hangs.

Or maybe iPXE has automated tests that we can run?

Stefan