How to netboot using ELILO
How to get EFI to netboot?
You do not need any additional software to get EFI to start a netboot session. Any EFI machine can be configured to start a PXE/DHCP session IF it has a network adapter that has support for the UNDI/PXE protocol. Most modern cards do have such support.
To enable netbooting, you need to go into the EFI boot manager maintenance menu and 'Add a boot option'. On the screen you see the list of devices to boot from. At least one of them should be of the form:
Load File [Acpi(PNP0A03,0)/Pci(5|0)/Mac(00D0B7A6FC25)]
which represent Ethernet card (Mac address). If you don't have such option, it means that you either do not have a network adapter in your machine or it does not have the UNDI/PXE support in its option ROM.
You need to select this option and give it a logical name such as 'netboot', for instance. Next, you leave the maintenance menu and go back to the main menu. You now have a new boot menu option. If you select 'netboot' then EFI will start the PXE/DCHP discovery request and look for a server to get an IP address.
On the server side, you can use a standard DHCP server.
Netbooting using PXE
EFI has builtin support for PXE. In fact it first tries PXE and then default to DHCP when it does not find a valid PXE server.
There is a PXE server package available from Linux/ia32 however this package does not have the necessary extensions to talk to the EFI side.
There is no need for special options or compile time flags to get elilo to work with PXE instead of standard DHCP. When netbooted, elilo will automatically detect if it has been downloaded via PXE or DHCP and it will adujst how subsequent files are requested.
You need a special version of the DHCPD server developed by the Internet Software Consortium (http://www.isc.org) with a special patch to add the PXE extensions. Unfortunately as of version 3.0xx, the patch has not yet made it into the official tree. It is supposed to show up in version 3.1 of the dhcpd server.
In any case, the elilo package contains a simple example of how you can configure the /etc/dhcpd.conf file for a PXE-aware DHCP server using the extensions provided in the patch. You can look in examples/dhcpd-pxe.conf. The syntax is very different from a standard dhcpd server.
The key elements to keep in mind are the PXE layers used by elilo to request the different
files:
Layer 0 : to get the name of the boot loader (elilo.efi)
Layer 1 : to get the name of the elilo config file
Layer 2 : to get the name of the kernel image
There is an IMPORTANT distinction between those layers. The first two (0,1) and requested systematically whereas the last one is used only when the configuration file is not found, i.e., what is the default kernel to boot. The actual files are STILL downloaded via TFTP. Therefore the TFTP server must also be configured (see previous section for more on this).
Getting the config file
In this mode, elilo use the PXE layer 1 to get the config file to use. Therefore this must be set on the server side. Elilo will use the following sequence when looking for a config file:
- use the name provide by the PXE server Layer 1 or
- elilo-ia64.conf/elilo-ia32.conf/elilo-x86_64 or
- elilo.conf
Sample elilo.conf file
chooser=textmenu
default=install
delay=20
prompt
message=boot-screens/elilo_menu.msg
f1=boot-screens/general.msg
f2=boot-screens/params.msg
relocatable
image=vmlinuz
label=install
description="Install"
initrd=initrd.gz
append="--"
read-only
image=vmlinuz
label=expert
description="Install [Expert mode]"
initrd=initrd.gz
append="priority=low --"
read-only
image=vmlinuz
label=rescue
description="Rescue"
initrd=initrd.gz
append="rescue/enable=true --"
read-only
Another one
boot=/dev/sda1
delay=30
timeout=50
default=Gentoo
append="console=ttyS0,9600"
prompt
image=/vmlinuz
label=Gentoo
root=/dev/sda2
read-only
image=/vmlinuz.old
label=Gentoo.old
root=/dev/sda2
read-only
Also take a look at elilo.conf, and Managing EFI Boot Loaders for Linux:
Using ELILO
Elilo stops at the first match. With PXE, elilo does not try to download a config file named after the assigned IP address as it does for DHCP because there is enough flexibility in the PXE server configuration to do this.
Getting the kernel image
When there is no config file, elilo will use the kernel name returned by
PXE layer 2. If it is not specified there, then it default to 'vmlinux'.
Getting the initial ramdisk
The filename for the ramdisk MUST come from the config file. Elilo does not use a PXE layer to ask for a default name.
Getting IP address information
When elilo is netbooted, the network filesystem module initializes some elilo variables with the information it received from the DHCP server. At a minimum, it received the IP address.
The following information is stored in the variables indicated below:
assigned IP address -> %I
assigned netmask -> %M
assigned domainname -> %D
assigned gateway -> %G
These variables can be used to dynamically adjust the command line arguments passed to the kernel.
For more information See PXE Linux and Implementing PXE Boot
Source:HP
Best Answer
[I would have preferred to leave this as a comment but I don't have the rep.]
I've been down this road trying to implement what I consider hybrid thin / diskless clients with PXE at the core. Originally I researched and tried NFS and used various ways to persist data. In the end, I found the method that was most resilient (as well as manageable) was to use PXE to iSCSI. By no means a trivial undertaking but once deployed it works quite well and affords all those standard management practices one desires. The primary difference is with iSCSI you have to largely preallocate a disk size.
The "how-to" is infrastructure dependent so I'll cite a reference: http://backreference.org/2013/12/23/diskless-iscsi-boot-with-pxe-howto/
(this is not a "your answer is somewhere in here" post)