-iSCSI booting with U-Boot and iPXE
-==================================
+# iSCSI booting with U-Boot and iPXE
-Motivation
-----------
+## Motivation
U-Boot has only a reduced set of supported network protocols. The focus for
network booting has been on UDP based protocols. A TCP stack and HTTP support
iPXE can be built as an EFI application (named snp.efi) which can be loaded and
run by U-Boot.
-Boot sequence
--------------
+## Boot sequence
U-Boot loads the EFI application iPXE snp.efi using the bootefi command. This
application has network access via the simple network protocol offered by
| |
| ~ ~ ~ ~|
-Security
---------
+## Security
The iSCSI protocol is not encrypted. The traffic could be secured using IPsec
but neither U-Boot nor iPXE does support this. So we should at least separate
the iSCSI traffic from all other network traffic. This can be achieved using a
virtual local area network (VLAN).
-Configuration
--------------
+## Configuration
-iPXE
-^^^^
+### iPXE
For running iPXE on arm64 the bin-arm64-efi/snp.efi build target is needed::
#define DOWNLOAD_PROTO_NFS /* Network File System Protocol */
#define DOWNLOAD_PROTO_FILE /* Local file system access */
-Links
------
+### Open-iSCSI
+
+When the root file system is on an iSCSI drive you should disable pings and set
+the replacement timer to a high value [3]:
+
+ node.conn[0].timeo.noop_out_interval = 0
+ node.conn[0].timeo.noop_out_timeout = 0
+ node.session.timeo.replacement_timeout = 86400
+
+## Links
* [1](https://ipxe.org) https://ipxe.org - iPXE open source boot firmware
* [2](https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/) https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/ -
- GNU GRUB (Grand Unified Bootloader)
+ GNU GRUB (Grand Unified Bootloader)
+* [3](https://github.com/open-iscsi/open-iscsi/blob/master/README)
+ https://github.com/open-iscsi/open-iscsi/blob/master/README -
+ Open-iSCSI README