possible bug in pxeboot with TFTP support

Hi all,

I compiled pxeboot with TFTP support by doing:
cd /usr/src/sys/boot
make -DLOADER_TFTP_SUPPORT

I have clients booting via PXE and grabbing their root filesystem from a memory disk. However, there was a long delay in the boot sequence. tcpdump revealed that after downloading pxeboot, the client was sending RPC traffic, presumably looking for NFS. This caused the boot to stall for 30 seconds or so until the loader spit out "NFS MOUNT RPC error: 60" and then continued booting via tftp.

I traced the error string back to /usr/src/sys/boot/i386/libi386/pxe.c and came up with a hack that skips the RPC probes and speeds the boot for me.

pxe-server# diff -u sys/boot/i386/libi386/pxe.c.orig sys/boot/i386/libi386/pxe.c
--- sys/boot/i386/libi386/pxe.c.orig Mon Mar 26 14:50:19 2007
+++ sys/boot/i386/libi386/pxe.c Mon Mar 26 14:46:02 2007
@@ -443,9 +443,10 @@
* ourselves. Use nfs_root_node.iodesc as flag indicating
* previous NFS usage.
*/
- if (nfs_root_node.iodesc == NULL)
- pxe_rpcmountcall();
-
+/* XXX
+ * if (nfs_root_node.iodesc == NULL)
+ * pxe_rpcmountcall();
+ */
fh = &nfs_root_node.fh[0];
buf[0] = 'X';
cp = &buf[1];


I'm wondering if someone with a clue can take a peek and confirm that things ought to behave differently. What I've stumbled across doesn't break PXE booting with a TFTP root filesystem, it just makes it much slower. Maybe I'm doing something wrong?


Regards,
RJ



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