booting/installing Solaris over HTTP

[tjstansell]

I'm going to hijack this thread since it doesn't seem like any conclusions were made and I'm trying to do the same thing, but I'm trying to rely on dhcp.

What I've managed so far is to be able to boot into the Solaris netboot environment with the following ipxe config:

#!ipxe
kernel http://${dhcp-server}/tftp/boot/solaris/multiboot kernel/unix -v - dhcp install -B $opts
module http://${dhcp-server}/tftp/boot/solaris/x86.miniroot.unzipped
imgstat
boot

where $opts has all of the solaris install options like:

console=ttya,install_config=IP:/path/to/jumpstart,sysid_config=IP:/path/to/sysidcfgs,install_media=IP:/path/to/install_media,install_boot=IP:/path/to/install_media/boot

It seems that pxegrub would uncompress the miniroot image automatically, but iPXE does not, so I had to pre-unzip the image before having ipxe load it.

The next problem is that pxegrub would normally hand over the dhcpack response to the Solaris kernel via drives_info property. The solaris seems to look for this per these references:

https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/...1450-L1462
https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/...#L325-L336

Also, it expects the dhcpack info to be encoded using the octet_to_hexascii() function, found here:

https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/...ctet.c#L53

and used here:

https://github.com/illumos/illumos-gate/...1038-L1064

Without ipxe being able to pass this dhcpack info over to the netboot kernel, the host comes up without any IP information and fails to boot properly. Is there any way we can get iPXE to encode the dhcpack the way pxegrub does so that it can replace pxegrub and I don't have to go create my own miniroot image to overwrite how dhcp is initiated? It would have to be some special option to kernel or some extra command to enable a pxegrub compatibility thing, I would assume.

A second request would be to have iPXE uncompress the miniroot image for us, like pxegrub does. By uncompressing it first, the image I have goes from about 90MB to 230MB, which is a lot more network traffic.

Any help here would be greatly appreciated.

Todd