Problems booting installer to UEFI system via PXE
by astrogeek from LinuxQuestions.org on (#5JQTJ)
I have been happily using a PXE server for all my installs and a few other things (ex. Gparted live) for several years. All my hardware had BIOS firmware so I had only to boot using pxelinux.0 and a single default menu.
I now have my first EFI hardware and have been banging my head the last 24 hours trying to set up a PXE boot for EFI of the Slackware64-14.2 installer (using HTTP or NFS for the media transfer - but I haven't gotten that far).
I have read many online resources about UEFI PXE, but have not found a single clear example. Most others seem to be as mystified as I am.
I have worked through several permutations of tftp file structure and dhcpd.conf configuration, without much success (some detail below). The EFI client is totally unhelpful and instantly overwrites whatever messages briefly flash past by dumping to a grub prompt.
Secure boot is disabled.
Using tcpdump on the server I can see that the client makes the dhcp request with the PXEClient arguments, the dhcp server replies with IP and filename to download. The client then makes the request for the filename using the assigned IP and the server sends the first packet of the file... the client then responds with a packet indicating "User has terminated the transfer".
I am using bootx64.efi from /EFI/boot/ as the boot loader with suitable grub.cfg (also named efidefault) and have tried isolinux/efiboot.img and the default initrd.img as initrd, but those are never actually requested so I suspect there is something about the bootx64.efi that it does not like.
My next step will be to download one of Eric's live ISO's (over 250k DSL) and see how he handles it in his PXE boots, but I still feel like I am missing something that everyone else knows!
Does anyone here PXE boot the Slackware EFI installer? If so, would you care to share your basic configuration?
Does anyone here know of a concise and complete and reproducible example of EFI boot of anything via PXE?
Thanks!
I now have my first EFI hardware and have been banging my head the last 24 hours trying to set up a PXE boot for EFI of the Slackware64-14.2 installer (using HTTP or NFS for the media transfer - but I haven't gotten that far).
I have read many online resources about UEFI PXE, but have not found a single clear example. Most others seem to be as mystified as I am.
I have worked through several permutations of tftp file structure and dhcpd.conf configuration, without much success (some detail below). The EFI client is totally unhelpful and instantly overwrites whatever messages briefly flash past by dumping to a grub prompt.
Secure boot is disabled.
Using tcpdump on the server I can see that the client makes the dhcp request with the PXEClient arguments, the dhcp server replies with IP and filename to download. The client then makes the request for the filename using the assigned IP and the server sends the first packet of the file... the client then responds with a packet indicating "User has terminated the transfer".
I am using bootx64.efi from /EFI/boot/ as the boot loader with suitable grub.cfg (also named efidefault) and have tried isolinux/efiboot.img and the default initrd.img as initrd, but those are never actually requested so I suspect there is something about the bootx64.efi that it does not like.
My next step will be to download one of Eric's live ISO's (over 250k DSL) and see how he handles it in his PXE boots, but I still feel like I am missing something that everyone else knows!
Does anyone here PXE boot the Slackware EFI installer? If so, would you care to share your basic configuration?
Does anyone here know of a concise and complete and reproducible example of EFI boot of anything via PXE?
Thanks!