Hi, All

This is a 'request for comments' email. Thanks for your time and patience. In our development of PXE boot and boot from SATA features, this question jumps to us. In short, do you think it makes sense to save the PXE downloaded binaries to local storage for future usage? Then how.

We think this is a common requirement, and the community should have a common code to support this, instead of allowing each vendor to implement their own private methods.

Here is what we thought, very basic. Welcome to share your opinion with us. Appreciate:

During PXE boot, the zImage launching sequence is like this:

UEFI (PXE) → Grub2.efi → zImage + dtb → launch...

zImage and dtb are fetched from a local server to the target board. It makes sense that to allow users to save these two files onto the board’s local storage, so next time they don’t have to download them again through the network.

So can we add a process in PXE boot to save kernel to a local permanent storage such as a SATA drive, or a Flash memory?

Here is a suggestion, to add 3 steps into PXE:

1. provide a user interface, to ask whether to save the kernel to local storage;

2. ask for a device path/folder name to save the files;

3. save the files.

UEFI BIOS to start download grub2.efi and run

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grub to download kernel by using UEFI API

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if user say Yes to save kernel to local storage

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ask for a local storage device name and a full path name

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writing to device

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launch kernel

Thanks in advance.

Best regards, Guodong Xu