iPXE NetBooting Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS

[brownmit]

Michael, thanks for the notes.

FYI, this is not UEFI; I really don't know why but the ubuntu 64 bit distributions for quite some time now are using the filename vmlinuz.efi regardless, and whatever it is works fine with both BIOS and UEFI.

So, I solved the problem, it was ridiculously simple yet obscure. I remembered reading somewhere that sometimes the load order between kernel and initrd is important, and while that wasn't the issue, it caused me to look carefully at the image load stack.

I had recently "optimized" my ipxe script to be more efficient managing the use of a background image for my menu; in my case it is titled widescreen.png. I switched to using the console option -keep to keep it in memory so on future console setup calls I wouldn't be reloading the image from my server.

It turns out keeping that in memory was the problem. It was the first thing loaded in memory so when booting, it was evidently being interpreted by the linux kernels as part of the initrd, causing unpacking of the initrd to fail. This effect did NOT happen with my winboot based configurations.

After redoing my console commands to remove the -keep and just load the image from my tftp server each time, and I threw in an imgfree before the image loads, and everything has been working perfectly since.