I’ve been working on natively compiling ipxe and FOS Linux to run on the raspberry pi 4. I’ve ran into a few issues with FOG.
First of all the raspberry pi does not support pxe booting out of the box (not a FOG issue), but the ipxe developers have a fork that supports pxe booting from a sd card https://github.com/ipxe/pipxe merging that project with FOG’s ipxe settings produces a sd card that will pxe boot into the FOG iPXE menu. Initially only did it to prove I could make it work. I just found out that the Pi 4 compute module (dedicated processor module) has an onboard MMC memory chip that can be programmed with an operating system by a convoluted process. This would be a perfect use case for FOG.
Now to the problems.
When you pxe boot right into the ipxe shell ${arch} is being set correctly to arm64 this is because cpuid is something only known to the ia32 and ia64 platforms. On arm64 the command fails and is unknown
ref: default.ipxe
cpuid --ext 29 && set arch x86_64 || set arch ${buildarch}
So arch is being set by the ${buildarch} ipxe command. For the raspberry pi build ${buildarch} is arm64 (the version I build of iPXE)
The first problem is that when you select hardware compatibility test from the FOG iPXE menu it attempts to load bzImage32. Inspecting the ${arch} value after the failure shows it being set to i386 by bootmenu.class.php
Looking at bootmenu.class.php I see a reference to arm at line 146. https://github.com/FOGProject/fogproject/blob/171d63724131c396029992730660497d48410842/packages/web/lib/fog/bootmenu.class.php#L146 IMO this test should be for arm64 or arm32 or (I think) aa64 not arm.
Edit: Looking at the linux kernel build I see the arch options are arm for 32 bit and arm64 for 64 bit.
I think I see where i386 is getting returned to ipxe because of the error in line 517
cpuid --ext 29 && set arch x86_64 || set arch i386
https://github.com/FOGProject/fogproject/blob/171d63724131c396029992730660497d48410842/packages/web/lib/fog/bootmenu.class.php#L517
That set arch i386 should be changed to match what default.ipxe has to offer. set arch ${buildarch}
The same at line 542, 699, 722, 745, 796, 821, and 1905
Fixing those lines still causes the hardware checker boot to fail with transferring bzImage32 to the target computer, but ${arch} now reports arm64 after the failure.
Looking into this more, at line 287 https://github.com/FOGProject/fogproject/blob/171d63724131c396029992730660497d48410842/packages/web/lib/fog/bootmenu.class.php#L287 it appears to only check for x64 arch and returns bzImage32 if the x64 check fails.
if ($_REQUEST['arch'] != 'x86_64') {
$bzImage = $bzImage32;
$imagefile = $init_32;
}
The code could be changed to this (I know it has hardcoded values, adding fields would also require webui changes. Until official support for ARM64 is added to FOG, this will work.
if ($_REQUEST['arch'] != 'x86_64') {
if ($_REQUEST['arch'] = 'arm64') {
$bzImage = "ImageArm64";
$imagefile = "init_arm64";
} else {
$bzImage = $bzImage32;
$imagefile = $init_32;
}
}
Note: compiling the 5.9.8 version of linux using the configuration settings for 5.6.18 produces a linux kernel file named Image.gz and not bzImage. I’m still looking into this, but one step at a time.
