PXE Booting IPFire

Getting Started with IPFire
1

Hey,

I’ve noticed an issue PXE booting IPFire. Don’t ask me why I went down this rabbit hole, but I’ve been building my own iPXE-based server that lets you boot from ISOs.

Trying to get IPFire to boot, I ran into an issue with the installer. While I can boot fine into the installer, it then attempts to download the ISO.

Switching terminal, I can see the logs of the installer as it does this. I note it runs the file downloadsource.sh. It creates a temporary FS mount, 512MB in size. The ISO it attempts to downloaded is reported to be 647MB in size. Therefore, the installer fails!

I can confirm this by looking at the source in the repo: https://git.ipfire.org/?p=ipfire-2.x.git;a=blob_plain;f=src/installer/downloadsource.sh;hb=HEAD

There is a line:
if ! mount -t tmpfs none "${OUTPUT_DIR}" -o size=512M; then

Perhaps we need to bump this up to something like 800M to be safe?

Hopefully someone can patch this?

Also, is it possible to pass an argument to point the installer on PXE boot to point to an ISO elsewhere?

Thanks,
David

2

Hallo @dmax

Welcome to the IPFire community.

This line has been the same in that script since CU87 back in 2015. Back then the iso was just 154M for i586.
The iso exceeded the 512M limit in CU192.

I will submit a patch for increasing that size.

Thanks for flagging this up.

4 Likes
3

I have submitted a patch increasing that mount value to 1024M. The size of the iso is continuing to increase with each kernel release and linux-firmware release so it was decide to give enough room for a reasonable while.

The patch has been merged into the IPFire next git repository.

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4

Super, great to hear!