Re: Problems booting Linux via PXE

[Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko]

On 08/25/2010 09:02 PM, 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.
>  
Please avoid using HTML mail. Changing color of your text only makes it
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Could you try newreloc branch which is about to be merged?
> 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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>   


-- 
Regards
Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko

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