PXE
This page is about using Gentoo as a PXE server to boot just about any operating system or bootable tool. Please extend it with your own experience. The primary focus is to boot live images and the page can get renamed once we have a better name for it.
TFTP server
Create TFTP root directory, this is where the chosen bootloader will be served from. Also make /tftproot owned by a user to not have to be root to do modifications
root #
mkdir /tftproot
root #
chown user:usergroup /tftproot
Then chose TFTP server, pick one of these:
atftp
One of the easiest TFTP servers to setup on Gentoo is net-ftp/atftp.
root #
emerge --ask net-ftp/atftp
Add to default startup, and start service
root #
rc-update add atftp default
root #
/etc/init.d/atftp restart
tftp-hpa
Many have best experience with net-ftp/tftp-hpa.
root #
emerge --ask net-ftp/tftp-hpa
To run it temporarily, use the following command line.
root #
in.tftpd -L --secure /tftproot
Bootloaders
The article about Diskless nodes contains plenty of useful information on how to setup a PXE environment.
GRUB2
For client configuration, see for example: Setup PXE boot with EFI Using Grub2 from openSUSE kiwi
You probably already have sys-boot/grub installed verify that it was installed with GRUB_PLATFORMS efi-32
, efi-64
, pc
Next "install" needed grub files to /tftproot
user $
grub-mknetdir --net-directory /tftproot
Netboot directory for i386-pc created. Configure your DHCP server to point to /tftproot/boot/grub/i386-pc/core.0 Netboot directory for i386-efi created. Configure your DHCP server to point to /tftproot/boot/grub/i386-efi/core.efi Netboot directory for x86_64-efi created. Configure your DHCP server to point to /tftproot/boot/grub/x86_64-efi/core.efi
iPXE
There is a few different options to get the iPXE bootloaders
The quickest way:
cd /tftproot for i in ipxe.efi snponly.efi undionly.kpxe ipxe.pxe; do wget -nc http://boot.ipxe.org/$i; done
But building from source (highly recommended from iPXE folks) is not hard, and allows for easy modifications.
Verify that some needed dependencies is installed:
root #
emerge --ask --oneshot dev-vcs/git
git clone git://git.ipxe.org/ipxe.git cd ipxe/src # pcbios files make -j8 bin/undionly.kpxe bin/ipxe.pxe cp bin/undionly.kpxe bin/ipxe.pxe /tftproot/ # x86_64 efi files make -j8 bin-x86_64-efi/snponly.efi bin-x86_64-efi/ipxe.efi cp bin-x86_64-efi/snponly.efi bin-x86_64-efi/ipxe.efi /tftproot/ # x86_32 efi files make -j8 bin-i386-efi/snponly.efi bin-i386-efi/ipxe.efi cp bin-i386-efi/snponly.efi /tftproot/snponlyx32.efi cp bin-i386-efi/ipxe.efi /tftproot/ipxex32.efi
Package sys-firmware/ipxe can be used, but needs USE flags such as efi
, undi
and still does not give all files we want.
PXELINUX
Exists as sys-boot/syslinux in portage and can be installed with
root #
emerge --ask sys-boot/syslinux
And copy over needed files to our /tftproot this is only basic files for pcbios kernel boot, other files might be needed for other platforms
user $
cp /usr/share/syslinux/pxelinux.0 /tftproot
user $
cp /usr/share/syslinux/ldlinux.c32 /tftproot
DHCP server
Bootable images
Gentoo installation
See Installation Alternatives - Diskless install using PXE for a guide on Gentoo.
Some projects exists to help setup such environment
- numberly/gentoo-pxe-builder with focus on Pxelinux and SSH automation for installation
- NiKiZe/Gentoo-iPXE with focus on iPXE
Fedora installation
The following script creates a TFTP directory tree, downloads kernel and initrd images from a Fedora mirror and configures a netbootable instance of GRUB.
~/bin/fedora-pxe-install
#!/bin/bash -xe # Mirror URL mirror="http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/" # Releases [ $# -eq 0 ] && releases="22 21/Server 21-Alpha/Workstation 20/Fedora" || releases="$*" # Architecture: x86 | x86_64 | ... architectures="x86_64 i386" # TFTP directory path prefix=/tftproot test -n "$prefix" menuentry() { cat << EOF menuentry "Install Fedora $release $arch ($state)" { linux /boot/$kernel repo=$repo initrd /boot/$initrd } EOF } check() { state="$1" repo="$mirror$state/$release/$arch/os" curl --silent --fail --head "$repo/" >/dev/null } download() { test -e "$1" && { echo "Skipping: $1" >&2; return 0; } echo "Downloading: $1 from $2" >&2 curl --silent --fail --output "$1" "$2" } grub2-mknetdir --net-directory "$prefix" for release in $releases; do for arch in $architectures; do check releases || check development || check releases/test || { echo "# Check failed for $release $arch"; break; } kernel="fedora-$(echo "$release" | tr / -)-$arch-kernel" initrd="fedora-$(echo "$release" | tr / -)-$arch-initrd" pxerepo="$repo/images/pxeboot" download "$prefix/boot/$kernel" "$pxerepo/vmlinuz" || { echo "# Couldn't download kernel for $release $arch"; break; } download "$prefix/boot/$initrd" "$pxerepo/initrd.img" || { echo "# Couldn't download initrd for $release $arch"; break; } menuentry done done | tee "$prefix/boot/grub/grub.cfg"
Adjust it to your needs and then run it without parameters.
root #
fedora-pxe-install
Now you just need to configure TFTP and DHCP so that /tftproot
is available to the netbooted machine and it that it requests /boot/grub/i386-pc/core.0
via TFTP.
Ubuntu installation
To install Ubuntu to a device via PXE, simply download an Ubuntu netboot image for the appropriate architecture. Note that most of the files in the release and architecture-specific directory are unnecessary, you simply need netboot.tar.gz
(about 40MB).
Extract that file to an appropriate TFTP-served directory and configure your DHCP server with the filename
directive to point at pxelinux.0
for the machine or subnet in question.
Note that you will also need to give the host(s) internet access as the netboot images are configured to pull packages down from the internet.