Features/VirtgPXE

= VirtgPXE =

Summary
Replace the deprecated etherboot pxe booting infrastructure with the more modern and currently upstream supported gpxe.

Owner

 * Name: Glauber Costa
 * email: glommer@redhat.com

Current status

 * Targeted release: Fedora 12
 * Last updated: 2009-08-05
 * Percentage of completion: 100%

Detailed Description
gpxe is currently the supported, more modern version of etherboot. For any etherboot bug we fix, the upstream response seems to be "we currently do not support etherboot, can you use gpxe instead?" We would like to answer "yes" to that question.

Fedora 11 onwards already has an gpxe package. So the proposal here is just to:


 * 1) make gpxe deprecate etherboot
 * 2) make qemu use the newer gpxe infrastructure, instead of etherboot.

Benefit to Fedora
Fedora will be using a more actively maintained piece of software, with a more active upstream community. It is also much more feature complete, and will allow us to use more interesting features wrt to remote booting.

How To Test

 * People doing network boot via pxe should make sure that every scenario should keep working.
 * Known bugs of etherboot, like local boot being borked, should start working

User Experience
Users of official Fedora virtualization technology will experience faster cherry picks of upstream bug fixes, and will be able to use a more modern pxe booting infrastructure, allowing for more interesting features to be used in virtual deployments.

Dependencies

 * No additional dependencies. gpxe package already exist

Contingency Plan

 * If it happens to be totally not-working, we can switch back to etherboot again.

Documentation

 * Upstream wiki page: http://etherboot.org/wiki/index.php

Release Notes

 * Fedora users can now take advantage of more modern network booting infrastructure

Comments and Discussion

 * See Talk:Features/VirtgPXE