[Beowulf] PXE/TFTP and Xen Kernel Issues
Jess Cannata
jac67 at georgetown.edu
Tue Dec 15 14:22:24 PST 2009
I'm having a problem booting Xen kernels via PXE. I want to boot a
machine via PXE that will then host Xen virtual machines. The client
machine PXE boots, receives the pxelinux.0 file, and then grabs the Xen
kernel (vmlinuz-2.6.18-164.6.1.el5xen). However, it can never load the
Xen kernel. On the client, I get the following error:
Invalid or corrupt kernel image.
I have tried the following three kernels (two stock Centos kernels and
one custom compiled kernel) and only the Xen kernel fails:
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2030154 Dec 10 15:28 vmlinuz-2.6.18-164.6.1.el5xen
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1932284 Sep 25 16:17 vmlinuz-2.6.18-164.el5
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3277584 Dec 10 15:29 vmlinuz-2.6.27.15-jw-node
The others load without error. I have checked multiple times that the
Xen kernel is not corrupt via md5sums and by booting it via grub. It
just seems not to like the PXE system. Here is a snippet of the dnsmasq
log to show that the file is sent correctly to the client:
Dec 11 04:12:57 julie dnsmasq[9117]: TFTP sent /tftpboot/pxelinux.0 to
192.168.0.6
Dec 11 04:12:57 julie dnsmasq[9117]: TFTP sent
/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default to 192.168.0.6
Dec 11 04:12:57 julie dnsmasq[9117]: TFTP sent
/tftpboot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-164.6.1.el5xen to 192.168.0.6
I have tried three different systems for the DHCP, TFTP, and PXE Servers
(using stock RHEL/Centos packages). Here are the specs:
System 1
Centos 5.4 (64-bit) with nvidia Ethernet adapters
dnsmasq for both DHCP and TFTP Servers
syslinux for PXE
System 2
Centos 5.4 (64-bit) with e1000 Ethernet adapters
dnsmasq for both DHCP and TFTP Servers
syslinux for PXE
System 3
Centos 5.3 (32-bit) with e1000 Ethernet adapters (trying 32-bit version
of the Xen kernel)
Config One:
dnsmasq for both DHCP and TFTP Servers
syslinux for PXE
Config Two:
dnsmasq for DHCP Server
tftp-server for TFTP Server
syslinux for PXE
The client machines use the same hardware as the servers. I haven't seen
anything about Xen kernels having issues with PXE. Before I start trying
different flavors of Linux, I'm curious if anyone else has seen or heard
of this problem.
Many thanks in advance.
Jess
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