Some Notes On Building gPXE for Coreboot

[Chris Kilgour]

http://www.whiterocker.com/gpxe/

FYI - At this point I don't plan to submit any patches to gPXE as my 
approach is rather hackish and still experimental.

Any comments/suggestions welcome.

Chris.

[Peter Stuge]

On Sat, Jun 07, 2008 at 09:23:07PM -0700, Chris Kilgour wrote:
> http://www.whiterocker.com/gpxe/
>
> FYI - At this point I don't plan to submit any patches to gPXE as
> my approach is rather hackish and still experimental.
>
> Any comments/suggestions welcome.

Great work!

How do you think that a "proper" port of gPXE to coreboot differs
from your approach?

//Peter

[Chris Kilgour]

Peter Stuge wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 07, 2008 at 09:23:07PM -0700, Chris Kilgour wrote:
> > FYI - At this point I don't plan to submit any patches to gPXE as
> > my approach is rather hackish and still experimental.
>
> How do you think that a "proper" port of gPXE to coreboot differs
> from your approach?

Off-hand I would say:

1.  The gPXE elfprefix is currently busted, it would be preferred to fix 
that so gPXE might build a well-formed ELF on its own.  At first I tried 
to fix it but gave up because of #2 below.
2. The "gPXE way" of producing final images is all about feeding a 
universal linker script, and I couldn't find a way of modifying it 
(trimming 16-bit code, getting the elfprefix right) to produce what I 
wanted without massive surgery that would affect a ton of regression 
cases.  So I went the "treat gPXE as a library" route instead.
3. I'm not sure if all the 16-bit gPXE stuff really needs to be omitted 
or if it can/should be left in the ELF.  I didn't want it, but others might.

I also don't have the bandwidth to deal with getting a patch morphed 
into shape that the gPXE maintainers would accept, but I welcome anyone 
with such inclinations to take the baton.

Chris.

[bari]

May we add this into the coreboot wiki?

-Bari

Chris Kilgour wrote:
> http://www.whiterocker.com/gpxe/
>
> FYI - At this point I don't plan to submit any patches to gPXE as my 
> approach is rather hackish and still experimental.
>
> Any comments/suggestions welcome.
>
> Chris.

[Chris Kilgour]

bari wrote:
> May we add this into the coreboot wiki?

I was going to do that originally.  But I wondered if putting it on the 
coreboot Wiki before any success reports would give it some 
as-yet-undeserved credence.

That said, if anyone would like to adapt my instructions to the coreboot 
Wiki, please feel free to do so.

Chris.

[Jordan Crouse]

On 07/06/08 21:23 -0700, Chris Kilgour wrote:
> http://www.whiterocker.com/gpxe/
>
> FYI - At this point I don't plan to submit any patches to gPXE as my 
> approach is rather hackish and still experimental.

I really like this patch:
http://www.whiterocker.com/gpxe/libpayload-lplconsole.patch

We should investigate ways to build this into the generic build to
work around other payloads that might have similar issues.

Jordan