On Sun, Nov 27, 2011 at 12:35 PM, Michael DeHaan michael.dehaan@gmail.com wrote:
As I never managed to get a good explanation myself in past years when people were asking for it, can you explain what GPXE does differently, and how much of the normal PXE chain it replaces, and when you *can't* use it? Is TFTPd completely out of the equation? The etherboot page talks about legacy boot ROMs, etc, but doesn't really make the case for itself. Not arguing against, but I'd just like to have it explained what it actually does. In any event, we need to be able to answer that when folks ask, and it seems the manpage or Wiki, at least, needs to explain usage.
The primary advantage is the ability to do everything through httpd. This gives you the ability to bypass the layer 2 restriction of DHCP without having to resort to tricks like Cisco's ip-helper. This isn't the only advantage - gpxe lets you boot remotely over a LOT of different medium (AoE, iscsi, etc.). The newer versions of kvm/libvirt have built-in gpxe support for their virtual NIC drivers, so chain loading for a KVM guest isn't even required.
- ks_mirror_name = string.join(distro.kernel.split('/')[-2:-1],'')
862
FYI -- This seems to imply the distro must be mirrored by Cobbler. It seems like the code needs to anticipate this this possibility?
Yes and no - there's no reason the http server in question has to be cobbler. Covering that case would be a todo, but I didn't give it priority since I believe the number of people who use the --available-as option are relatively small. I'm pretty sure that option doesn't work with esxi4 either (since at least 6 files need to be copied to the tftp directory), so I figured the people who'd use this feature right now for esxi5 wouldn't care about that limitation anyway.