PXE Boot FreeBSD with Etherboot

[Norbert Koch]

> > > It seems there are some problems with using pxeboot in 
> combination with
> > > the network boot code from the etherboot project.  I have tried many
> > > combinations of options with no success.  The result is very 
> similar to
> > > the following photo I found:
> > > 
> > > http://photos.night-shade.org.uk/photo.php?photo=6364
> > > 
> > > I have tried it both on my local machine and in vmware with the same
> > > result.  It seems that somehow etherboot is not setting up the
> > > environment the way pxeboot expects it too.  Now the native pxe boot
> > > code in vmware does load pxeboot correctly and I have successfully
> > > booted freebsd in vmware, however I can't get the pxe boot code on my
> > > network card to load at all, hence my need for etherboot.  Also, both
> > > pxeboot from FreeBSD 4.11 and 6.0-BETA2 crash the same way.  I'm
> > > assuming this is really a bug in etherboot, but I'm not sure 
> how to get
> > > a crash dump to play with.  With vmware, it seems like I 
> should be able
> > > to save a memory image to examine, but I'm not sure how to do that.
> > > Any ideas on a fix for this?
> > 
> > Just my experience. I never handled to successfully pxeboot FreeBSD.
> 
> pxeboot works fine! i have some 50 hosts pxeboot'ing that say so.
> 
> it's etherboot loading pxeboot that does not work.

I did not try etherboot. I tried a pc104 board with
bios's internal pxe function for the integrated intel 82551/9er chip.
And it is reported that e.g. linux boots successfully on these boards.
I manage to boot from disk with etherboot (5.2.4), but not using pxe.

Norbert