[ovirt-users] PXE boot issue

[Paul Heinlein]

On Thu, 9 Apr 2015, Michal Skrivanek wrote:

>
> On Apr 9, 2015, at 10:49 , Brandon Merjil <bmerjil at ken-ohki.org> wrote:
>
>> I looked at that as well but ovirt is using gPXE, and I my 
>> situation there is no loop. it just stops after trying once. Is 
>> there an api reference for the run once option. I'd like to have 
>> some thing to point to if I start asking the foreman group about 
>> this.
>
> I believe Sven is right; RunOnce is not relevant if you speak about 
> reboot within the guest OS. I suppose that's the case. It is the 
> same QEMU process then and the only difference might be in PXE 
> bootrom, possibly a gPXE bug.

We're still running oVirt Engine 3.5.0 on Fedora 19, but I recently 
upgraded our hypervisor nodes to CentOS 7 (and then 7.1). I've had no 
end of trouble with the boot rom images available for CentOS 7.1 
nodes. There are two sets of files and one set of symlinks:

   * /usr/share/qemu-kvm/rhel6-*.rom
     -> actual files
     -> installed by qemu-kvm-rhev package
     -> the default images used by oVirt-installed qemu-kvm

   * /usr/share/ipxe/*.rom
     -> actual files
     -> installed by ipxe-roms-qemu package

   * /usr/share/qemu-kvm/pxe-*.rom
     -> symlinks pointing to ../ipxe/*rom images
     -> installed by qemu-kvm-rhev package

I'll note that the qemu-kvm-rhev package is provided by the oVirt 
team; it's not part of the stock CentOS repository.

In our environment, the rhel6-*.rom images won't accept responses from 
our DHCP server (dhcpd on CentOS 6), while the iPXE images fail when 
loading the 64-bit installation kernels for very new distributions: 
CentOS 7.1, Ubuntu 1410 and 1404, and Debian sid.

In the end, I punted. I extracted the iPXE images from the Fedora 20 
ipxe-roms-qemu and tasked cfengine with pushing them into place:

10222000.rom -> /usr/share/qemu-kvm/rhel6-pcnet.rom
10ec8029.rom -> /usr/share/qemu-kvm/rhel6-ne2k_pci.rom
10ec8139.rom -> /usr/share/qemu-kvm/rhel6-rtl8139.rom
1af41000.rom -> /usr/share/qemu-kvm/rhel6-virtio.rom
8086100e.rom -> /usr/share/qemu-kvm/rhel6-e1000.rom

That's the only solution that works for me.

NOTE: The ROM images must be the same on all your hypervisor nodes; if 
they aren't, live migrations will fail.

-- 
Paul Heinlein
heinlein at madboa.com
45°38' N, 122°6' W