This is a simple setup for a PXE environment on a Debian 10+ (currently running and tested on Debian 12) system.
This repository uses a Git submodule to include localboot.lua, so you should
probably use
git clone --recursive https://github.com/TobiX/pxe.git
or update the submodules after the clone:
git submodule init
git submodule update
Most tools are just symlinked into the matching Debian packages, so you should install at least
syslinux-common syslinux-efi pxelinux
Since 2021-05, this repository uses a bunch of symlinks to support BIOS and EFI64 boot from the same config. While this seems to work for some options, the EFI code path is much less tested then the BIOS code path. (there are probably some options which flat-out don't work in EFI mode)
To use the Debian installer entry, install di-netboot-assistant, configure it
to your liking and run
di-netboot-assistant --arch=amd64 install stable stable-gtk
(or similar).
Grab the files vmlinuz and initrd.img from the grml ISO (they are somewhere
in boot/grml64*/) and put them into the grml directory. Put the
GRML SquashFS (In live/grml64*/*.squashfs on the ISO) on a webserver and
adjust the URL in common.cfg.
This is probably the minimal setup to use this setup with dnsmasq (assuming this isn't the "main" DHCP server):
dhcp-range=192.168.1.0,proxy
pxe-service=x86PC,"pxelinux BIOS",bios/pxelinux
pxe-service=x86-64_EFI,"syslinux EFI64",efi64/syslinux.efi
enable-tftp
tftp-root=/srv/tftp
# Disable DNS (if you are using a different server for DNS)
port=0
You can test some aspects of this setup using qemu. For BIOS boot use:
qemu-system-x86_64 -accel kvm -cpu host -netdev user,id=net0,tftp=$PWD,bootfile=bios/pxelinux.0 -device virtio-net-pci,netdev=net0 -boot n
For UEFI boot use:
qemu-system-x86_64 -accel kvm -cpu host -netdev user,id=net0,tftp=$PWD,bootfile=efi64/syslinux.efi -device virtio-net-pci,netdev=net0 -boot n -drive file=/usr/share/OVMF/OVMF_CODE_4M.fd,if=pflash,format=raw,unit=0,readonly=on
The TianoCore files are in the ovmf Debian package