iPXE discussion forum

Hello,

I am having issues with booting the Ubuntu Live Image via iPXE on UEFI. I've tried two laptops, and they both kernel panic. What is weird, though, is that it boots fine inside VirtualBox, but not on actual UEFI.

Relevant Code (approximation):

kernel nfs://.../vmlinuz.efi
initrd nfs://.../initrd.lz
imgargs vmlinuz.efi initrd=initrd.lz netboot=nfs nfsroot=... boot=casper

I found about the need for initrd=initrd.name from somewhere in the forums, looks like it's a bug in kernels prior to 3.16 or so. Without it, not even VBox works. When removing it in fact, it produces the EXACT same kernel panic in VBox.

It sounds like adding that piece of text should have fixed everything, but it still appears broken when it comes to actual UEFI hardware.

Any ideas?

The additional initrd=initrd.lz on the kernel command line is because UEFI kernels load their ramdisks from a virtual filesystem, while legacy BIOS already has them described via a pointer provided to the booted kernel.

It might be useful to see the actual kernel panic message to figure out where to go from here. If you're getting a "missing root device"-type error then it is pretty obvious that your initrd is not loaded properly by the kernel. Are you sure you boot vbox in UEFI mode? You might have no issues because you're booting vbox in legacy bios mode and bare-metal in UEFI mode and your issue is purely visible in UEFI mode.