Flexboot ipxe.pxe Chainloading

If you have a large number of machines which already have a PXE implementation, then you may want to avoid having to reflash each machine's network card individually. You can achieve this by using chainloading.

To enable chainloading, you need to place a copy of iPXE on your TFTP server. Your machines will download this copy of iPXE from the TFTP server each time that they boot.

Warning

Before trying to chainloading ipxe.pxe, verify if the ipxe supports the hardware driver ID. For the NVIDIA device ID, see: https://ipxe.org/appnote/hardware_drivers

To enable chainloading over InfiniBand mode, configure the "DHCP HW Type IB" setting through HII/CtrlB (from the NIC Configuration Menu), and add the GUID identification alongside the 61 DUID option to the DHCP host declaration. For example:

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host ib-client1 { hardware infiniband <Port-GUID> option dhcp-client-identifier = 01:<Port-MAC> ; fixed-address <IPoIB Address> ; filename "ipxe.pxe" ; if exists user-class and option user-class = "iPXE" { filename “pxelinux.0” ; } }

Or:

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host ib-client1 { option dhcp-client-identifier = ff:00:00:00:00:00:02:00:00:02:c9:00:<Port-GUID> ; hardware ethernet <Port-MAC> ; fixed-address <IPoIB Address> ; filename "ipxe.pxe" ; if exists user-class and option user-class = "iPXE" { filename “pxelinux.0” ; } }

© Copyright 2023, NVIDIA. Last updated on Dec 13, 2023.