Undionly.kpxe and ipxe.efi

[Tom Elliott]

@Wayne-Workman To be honest, I imagine the dhcp-boot line may not even be needed. I say this because it is going to present you the menu options you have, and load that file. I suppose it does need to know where to look for the relevant NBP file.

[Sebastian Roth]

Yes you are tight Tom. Wayne and I were just trying something “unusual” to see if we could make his EFI machine boot. Unfortunately we couldn’t. Too bad.

But we found something new. Stay tuned on this…

[Quantum]

I’m not as familiar with dnsmasq and ipxe, but I have been successful using isc-dhcp and syslinux.efi for a while in another pxe environment. It was successfully loading memtestx86+ and gparted live in EFI mode. Again, I don’t know about ipxe, but Syslinux is now packing all their libraries (c32’s) in architecture specific subdirectories. I should also note that - in my experience - once the efi version is loaded, it can’t load a BIOS loader: eg. cant load pxelinux.0 from syslinux.efi. Likewise, I wasn’t able to load any kernels that didn’t have EFI boot stubs.This weekend I’ll try setting up a copy of the above environment at home and see if I can switch it to iPXE. Can’t make a promise that it will happen this weekend though because it’s my daughters birthday.

option architecture-type code 93 = unsigned integer 16;
#64 bit syslinux.efi renamed to bootx64.efi
#32 bit syslinux.efi no name change
#changed from pxelinux.0 to new lpxelinux.0
if option architecture-type = 00:09 {
filename "bootx64.efi"
} elsif option architecture-type = 00:07 {
  filename "bootx64.efi"
} elsif option arch = 00:06 {
 filename "syslinux.efi"
} else {
 filename "lpxelinux.0"
}

[Sebastian Roth]

You are welcome to give it a try with iPXE. I am pretty sure it works. Your config options look alright. Wayne has already done it with ISC DHCP too. But we are now trying to get this running with dnsmasq in proxy mode (isc-dhcp unfortunatelly cannot do proxy mode) as this would be great for a lot of users who cannot alter their main DHCP config in a productive environment.

[Wayne Workman]

I just stumbled across something that might be the key to our woes with dnsmasq and linux DHCP…

I’m using this configuration with Linux ISC-DHCP right now:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cDKvUXkWVE_FOHAD8e13GF8scwAgtx99fMgXaVcsnZI/edit?usp=sharing

My UEFI enabled work laptop still will not network boot, it just sits there saying “iPXE initialising devices”

However, look what journalctl -xe reveals!
a TFTP error!

[Sebastian Roth]

@Wayne-Workman said:

My UEFI enabled work laptop still will not network boot, it just sits there saying “iPXE initialising devices”

To me this sounds like iPXE does not like your network card in UEFI mode. You might want to compile a binary with debugging enabled to find out what’s wrong. I doubt this has something to do with TFTP.

@Wayne-Workman said:

However, look what journalctl -xe reveals!
a TFTP error!

Maybe I am blind but I only see “client does not accept options”. That’s not an issue (https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:PXE_boot_installation#No_options_accepted) and can be ignored if you see iPXE coming up (gets loaded via TFTP).

[Wayne Workman]

I’ve been thinking A LOT about the many many problems with all the Vendor Class identifiers that Apple has…

Because PC is so standard (like PXEClient:Arch:00000 and PXEClient:Arch:00007 ), and because Apple are extreme non-conformists,

It makes no sense to try to define a class for each apple device. it’s stupid.

I say - make ipxe.efi the default and then make classes for the various PC PXEClient architectures.

Abandon Macs that are 32 bit. Just don’t worry about them.