RE: Support for PXE Chainloading windows?

[Mroczek, Joseph T]

Oliver:

Sadly ipxe does not get us anywhere close to where we need to be. We have to 
support a huge menu of linux images as well as huge menu of windows images from 
network boot. We need i386-pc, x86_64-pc, i386-efi, x86_64-efi and we may be 
adding arm-efi and ia64-efi in the near future. iPXE does not come close to 
reliably providing this level of support, grub is the closest.

The reason we need this is that we have literally hundreds of different models 
of devices from phones all the way up to 16-way servers. We need to be able to 
restore these devices to known good configurations. Each with their own sets of 
often incompatible tools. Some are Linux only, some windows only. We need the 
capabilities to both clone OS and install fresh for a long list of operating 
systems. We had been working happily for years with pxelinux for the -pc 
platforms, but chainloading efi binaries is not supported. Hence we turned to 
grub. 

If you want some more details as to why this is important or want pointers to 
some other folks who have to dual boot, let me know.

~joe

From: address@hidden [mailto:address@hidden On Behalf Of Oliver Rath
Sent: Tuesday, April 29, 2014 3:17 PM
To: address@hidden
Subject: Re: Support for PXE Chainloading windows?

Hi Joe,

I think, this is possible, but I dont see any ues case for this. There are much 
more better possibilities to solve this. See http://www.ipxe.org

Regards
Oliver

Am 29.04.2014 22:43, schrieb Mroczek, Joseph T:
Hello:
 
Does any know if using grub2 booted from PXE load to the Microsoft PXE loader 
is expected to work?
 
I see some older messages saying that chainloading is not available in PXE for 
grub2. However there appears to be a pxechainload command.
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/grub-devel/2010-08/msg00109.html
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-grub/2010-12/msg00012.html 
 
I am fumbling around trying to find a working solution, so far I have not for 
i386/x86_64.
 
~joe
 



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