Itanium

From Wiki

Itanium (IA-64) based hardware supports PXE. At least recent HP IA-64 machines that I have tried do. All ia64 machines use EFI, and the EFI standard now (I have not had the hardware to test older EFI implementations) includes PXE. The only other element needed (besides of course a suitable kernel and initrd) is ELILO . ELILO is an EFI bytecode program that is used for loading Linux kernels. It is like LILO in the format of its configuration files, but like PXELINUX in that it can retrieve files from TFTP sources.

You can get a pre-compiled ia64 binary from the ELILO website.

If, like me, you have a DHCP environment that already supports ia32/x86_64 machines that you don't want to break, you will want to make a special case for your ia64 machines. If using ISC's DHCPD you will want to make a class entry in dhcpd.conf thusly:

class "Itanium" {
# this should match all HP ia64 machines
        match if option vendor-class-identifier = "PXEClient:Arch:00002:UNDI:003016";
        filename "/elilo.efi";
}

This will have the effect of specifying elilo.efi as the boot file only for machine that send PXEClient:Arch:00002:UNDI:003016 in their DHCPDISCOVER (the "00002" represents the ia64 architecture)

Like PXELINUX, ELILO will first look for .conf files based on the IP address of the client; then, if no such file exists, request elilo.conf from the TFTP server. A machine that was given the IP address 172.16.230.248 (ac10e6f8 in hex) asked for the following files in the order shown: /AC10E6F8.conf, /AC10E6-ia64.conf, /AC10E6.conf, /AC10-ia64.conf, /AC10.conf, /AC-ia64.conf, /AC.conf, /elilo-ia64.conf, /elilo.conf.

An example elilo configuration file that starts a network-based installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is shown below (N.B. all file paths are relative to the TFTP root):

prompt
timeout=50
relocatable

image=osinstall/vmlinuz-rhel4-u4-ia64
        initrd=osinstall/initrd.img-rhel4-u4-ia64
        label=rhel4install
        read-only
        append="ramdisk_size=12288 maxcpus=1 network ip=dhcp method=nfs:moby:/srv/redhat/rhel4/as/ia64/U4/ lang=en_GB keymap=uk ksdevice=eth0"

In the case of the hardware I tried (an rx6600) all console was automatically through serial as the machine had no graphics device (a common configuration for HP ia64 machines). Please let us know about success or failure on other ia64 platforms.

You may also find this information about network booting Debian on an older Itanium workstation useful.