Tribblix - making PXE boot work

One of the key changes in the latest milestone of Tribblix is the ability to bot and install a system over the network, using PXE. I've covered how to set this up elsewhere, but here I'll talk a little about how this is implemented under the covers.

Essentially, the ISO image has 3 pieces.

1. The platform directory contains the kernel, and the boot archive. This is what's loaded at boot.
2. The file solaris.zlib is a lofi compressed file containing an image of the /usr filesystem.
3. The pkgs directory contains additional SVR4 packages that can be installed.

When booting from CD, grub loads the boot archive into memory and hands over control. There's then a little bit of magic where it tries to mount every device it can find looking for the CD image - it actually checks that the .volsetid file found on a device matches the one in the boot archive to ensure it gets the right device, but once that's done it mounts the CD image in a standard place and from then on knows precisely where to find everything.

When you boot via PXE, you can't blindly search everywhere in the network for the location of solaris.zlib, so the required location is set as a boot argument in menu.lst, and the system extracts the required value from the boot arguments.

What it will get back is a URL of a server, so it appends solaris.zlib to that and retrieves it using wget. The file is saved to a known location and then lofi mounted. Then boot proceeds as normal.

Note that you can use any dhcp/tftp server  for the PXE part, and any http server. There's no requirement on the server side for a given platform, configuration, or software. (And it doesn't even have to be http, as long as it's a protocol built into wget.)

It's actually very simple. There are, of course, a few wrinkles along the way.

• There are some files in /usr that are needed to mount /usr, so the boot archive contains a minimally populated copy of /usr that allows you to bootstrap the system until you mount the real /usr over the top of it
• For PXE boot, you need more such files in the boot archive than you do for booting from CD. In particular, I had to add prtconf (used in parsing boot arguments) and wget (to do the retrieve over http)
• I add wget rather than curl, as the wget package is much smaller than the curl package, even though I had previously standardised on curl for package installation
• Memory requirements are a little higher than for a CD boot, as the whole of solaris.zlib is copied into memory. However, because it's in memory, the system is really fast

It's possible to avoid this by simply putting all of /usr into the boot archive. The downside to that is that it's quite slow to load - you haven't got a fully-fledged OS running at that point, tftp isn't as reliable as it should be and can fail when retrieving larger files, and it pushes up the hard memory requirement for a CD boot. So I've stuck with what I have, and it works reasonably well.

The final piece of the ISO image is the additional packages. If you tell the system nothing, it will go off to the main repositories to download any packages. (Please, don't do this. I'm not really set up to deliver that much traffic.) But you can copy the pkgs directory from the iso image and specify that location as a boot argument so the installer knows where the packages are. What it actually does underneath is set that location up as the primary repository temporarily during the install.

The present release doesn't have automation - booting via PXE is just like booting from CD, and you have to run the install interactively. But all the machinery is now in place to build a fully automated install mechanism (think like jumpstart, although it'll achieve the same goals via completely different means).

One final note. Unlike the OpenSolaris/Solaris 11/OpenIndiana releases which have separate images for server, desktop, and network install, Tribblix has a single image that does all 3 in one. The ability to define installed packages eliminates the need for separate desktop (live) and server (text) images, and the PXE implementation described here means you can take the regular iso and use that for network booting.