iPXE Not Working on 14.04

[jjahns]

Ubuntu 14.04.1
Qemu 2.0.0

Hi - I am trying to get PXE to work for a VM on a host running 14.04.1 and QEMU 2.0.0.

During boot, I only get the "Booting from hard disk" failure message.

I need to figure out why this is. We have 12.04.5 servers running QEMU 1.5 that boot PXE just fine.

Is there anything extra that needed to be configured in order to make it work? Which logs can I grab some data that might be of benefit?

[robinsmidsrod]

It seems like you don't have PXE (network) booting enabled for the VM. If you have, make sure that you're using a recent iPXE ROM with QEMU. Running QEMU from the command line with verbose logging should probably tell you what's going on.

[jjahns]

(2014-12-03 14:59)robinsmidsrod Wrote:  It seems like you don't have PXE (network) booting enabled for the VM. If you have, make sure that you're using a recent iPXE ROM with QEMU. Running QEMU from the command line with verbose logging should probably tell you what's going on.

I found out that in 14.04, when libvirt starts a VM, it starts with strict=on, which does not allow boot from network. I don't have a way of overriding this if we use libvirt as the hypervisor type from Openstack.

We are investigating those options, but so far it doesn't look good from that front. Nova does not have options from what we can tell that overrides this value or provides an option to use network boot.

[robinsmidsrod]

As we're dealing with VMs, you can boot iPXE using either ipxe.iso (CD) or ipxe.dsk (floppy) instead of via PXE (network). That might avoid the problem with having to remove strict=on. Getting access to ipxe.dsk from the QEMU host shouldn't be a problem, I guess.

[jjahns]

(2014-12-03 17:09)robinsmidsrod Wrote:  As we're dealing with VMs, you can boot iPXE using either ipxe.iso (CD) or ipxe.dsk (floppy) instead of via PXE (network). That might avoid the problem with having to remove strict=on. Getting access to ipxe.dsk from the QEMU host shouldn't be a problem, I guess.

That would still require a lot of manual intervention.

I believe this is libvirt's fault, as reviewing the code updates, they added this by default (previously in 12.04 the default was off).

[robinsmidsrod]

Seems like you're stuck between two hard choices. It would be nice if you post an update here if you find a solution, as I'm sure more people than you struggle with it.