UEFI PXE Ubuntu Installation

Posted on Fri 26 June 2015 in misc

Recently, I tried a network installation on a brand new rack server Dell PowerEdge R730. I used the same procedure I have always used. This server can't make a PXE boot on legacy boot mode (BIOS), UEFI mode can. Ok, let's used UEFI !

Unfortunately, my PXE boot failed with :

Boot failed : PXE Device 1 : Integrated NIC 1 Port 1 Partition 1

After some research, I found that Syslinux, which I used for booting Ubuntu installer, isn't compatible with UEFI ! (http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php/PXELINUX#UEFI)

"The "(l)pxelinux.0" bootloaders are capable of netbooting BIOS-based clients"
In order to enable PXE boot for UEFI we must provide 64bit version of syslinux.efi.
First, download latest version of syslinux package on kernel.org. https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/boot/syslinux/
Untar it inside a temporary directory.
Next, copy these files inside your tftp server directory.
cp syslinux-6.03/efi64/com32/elflink/ldlinux/ldlinux.e64 /tftpboot/
cp syslinux-6.03/efi64/efi/syslinux.efi /tftpboot
Note : some UEFI devices tried 32bit boot, in this case, you should used efi32.
In order to don't break configuration for PXE-BIOS boot, we need to take care of provide the good file for bios or UEFI.  ISC-Dhcp can.

In your /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf :

replace:

filename "pxelinux.0"

by :

option architecture-type code 93 = unsigned integer 16;
if option architecture-type = 00:09 {
 filename "syslinux.efi";
 } elsif option architecture-type = 00:07 {
 filename "syslinux.efi";
 } else {
 filename "pxelinux.0";
}

Hope this help,
Tristan

References :

Ubuntu