Boot issues with UEFI32 & x86_64 CPU

[Tom Elliott]

@EspenU I think saying, “this doesn’t work well” doesn’t help anybody because we have no reference point. “This of course doesn’t go well” what exactly happens when it tries to load?

[EspenU]

@george1421 I can try that later today to see what happens. Although it will not work as a production solution since I will be imaging around 100 of these per year…

[EspenU]

@Tom-Elliott Right, sorry about that.
What happens when it “does not go very well” is what I described further up in my post.
It just jumps back to a non-graphical version of the FOG boot menu. No errors or messages of any kind as far as I can see.

[Tom Elliott]

@EspenU Often times the menu is refreshed as you described because something failed while it was trying to load. All of the “failures” revert to “goto MENU”.

I don’t know why you would need 32 bit though. Maybe UEFI 32 can only pass off to a 32 bit binary, but that makes no sense either.

[george1421]

@Tom-Elliott There are FOG configuration settings where you can globally change what kernels are sent to the client. Just change the 64 bit setting to send the 32 bit kernel and inits. There should be no harm for using the 32 bit kernels for everything since the 64 bit CPUs are backwards compatible. The 32 bit version of FOS should work just fine for deploying both x32 and x64 systems.

Again I use the words “should” because I have not personally tried this myself.

[Tom Elliott]

Location is:

FOG Configuration Page->FOG Settings->TFTP Server-> FOG_TFTP_PXE_KERNEL FOG_PXE_BOOT_IMAGE

Just change bzImage and init.xz to bzImage32 and init_32.xz respectively.

[Tom Elliott]

And pictures might go a lot further than trying to describe it, either pictures or a short video would go a long way for us to better see the issue and hopefully figure out a solution.

I’m going to move this post into FOG Problems as this, from what I can tell, is NOT a bug at least where fog is concerned. Of course, please provide a browser output of what’s being presented as well.

I think you could do this with:

http://fogserver/fog/service/ipxe/boot.php?arch=x86_64&platform=efi

[EspenU]

@Tom-Elliott said in Boot issues with UEFI32 & x86_64 CPU:

Location is:

FOG Configuration Page->FOG Settings->TFTP Server-> FOG_TFTP_PXE_KERNEL FOG_PXE_BOOT_IMAGE

Just change bzImage and init.xz to bzImage32 and init_32.xz respectively.

I’ll try that. Thanks.

[EspenU]

@Tom-Elliott said in Boot issues with UEFI32 & x86_64 CPU:

And pictures might go a lot further than trying to describe it, either pictures or a short video would go a long way for us to better see the issue and hopefully figure out a solution.

I’m going to move this post into FOG Problems as this, from what I can tell, is NOT a bug at least where fog is concerned. Of course, please provide a browser output of what’s being presented as well.

I think you could do this with:

http://fogserver/fog/service/ipxe/boot.php?arch=x86_64&platform=efi

I’ll try to compile some more information during the week so it’s easier to see.
However, since it’s possible to work around the issue by changing the default kernel it might be just as good to use that as a “solution” and close the issue.
This strange combination of 32-bit and 64-bit hardware is probably not very common, and for those edge cases it should be fine just to force the 32-bit kernel.

Thanks for your help :-).

[george1421]

@EspenU As I posted before, if you have issues with the 64 bit kernel for some reason, just use the 32 bit kernel for all imaging needs. You can use this kernel universally for both 32 bit and 64 bit systems. There is no technical advantage of the 64 bit over the 32 bit kernel. Just renaming the global 64 bit kernel and inits values to point to the 32 bits stuff should be sufficient for all of your imaging needs.