Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 820264
livecd-iso-to-pxeboot doesn't work with Fedora 17
Last modified: 2012-05-17 16:31:15 EDT
Created attachment 583287 [details] kernel panic screenshot Description of problem: I tried to create a bootable PXE entries for Fedora 17 TC3 Live i686. But during boot I receive kernel panic, see screenshot. I used the config created by livecd-iso-to-pxeboot: LABEL Fedora 17 TC3 i686 Live (EXPERIMENTAL) KERNEL vmlinuz0 INITRD initrd0.img APPEND rootflags=loop root=live:/Fedora-17.TC3-i686-Live-Desktop.iso rootfstype=auto ro liveimg quiet rhgb rd.luks=0 rd.md=0 rd.dm=0 Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): livecd-tools-16.11-1.fc16.x86_64 How reproducible: always Steps to Reproduce: 1. sudo livecd-iso-to-pxeboot ~/iso/Fedora-17.TC3-i686-Live-Desktop.iso 2. boot it Additional info: Also it does not print any dots during initrd retrieval, but that's really a minor issue.
I followed this guide: https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/wiki/HowToPxeAnyLiveCd
Please retry with TC5 or later. It worked for me using Fedora-17.TC5-x86_64-Live-Desktop.iso
Created attachment 584934 [details] kernel panic with F17 TC6 I have the same problem with F17 TC6.
Created attachment 584940 [details] another panic with TC6 Ok, now I know what's the reason. My colleague's laptop shows the first message, which is "initrd too large to handle, disabling initrd". Does that mean that the particular hardware is not capable of booting it at all?
There is a limit to how large the initrd can be on i686. I can't tell exactly what it is from reading the kernel source.
Created attachment 585028 [details] This patch makes the traceback slightly more reasonable. This patch (against kernel) won't fix your problem, which is that you're running out of ram, but it will panic when the problem occurs instead of going on to corrupt the stack and panic then.
I have correctly created and booted F17 RC1 x86_64 Live using livecd-iso-to-pxeboot. So it is really a problem only with i686 images. Shouldn't livecd-iso-to-pxeboot print a warning if it is highly probable that the image might not boot (i686 arch)? It would be great, that would save me a lot of time. Also the guide [1], if you have write access to it, should be adjusted. [1] https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/wiki/HowToPxeAnyLiveCd
The actual limit depends on the hardware, how much ram and how things are mapped, so there is no way to set a threshold.
OK. Just to add missing pieces of information, I was not able to boot i686 LiveCD over PXE even on Thinkpad T500 (Core2 Duo) with 8GB RAM.