Re: coreos baremetal PXEboot illegal opcode

[Paul Morgan]

On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 3:45 AM, Niels Buyens <niels...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I keep getting an illegal opcode when trying to install coreos with
> pxelinux.
> I use an HP Proliant G8 DL360 with smartarray P410.
> I have tried using the alpha release but the problem persists.
>
> Ideally I would like to run a couple (4 for now) diskless compute nodes
> running CoreOS.


We have seen this across multiple distributions.

If you currently have `localboot 0` in your pxe config, try
change to `localboot -1`.

Some HP gear needs `localboot 0`, some needs `localboot -1`, to avoid
illegal opcode errors.

From http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php/Syslinux_4_Changelog

"PXELINUX: disable a hack that would make localboot work on some
machines, but break just about as many. Some machines which worked
with "localboot 0" in previous versions may need "localboot -1" in
this one. If you have a machine which requires "localboot -1", a copy
of the dmidecode or sysdump output would be appreciated."

Some HP gear has a different issue that results in illegal opcode:

http://h20565.www2.hpe.com/hpsc/doc/public/display?docId=emr_na-c02695572-1

"After making changes to the kernel or GRUB where Linux will boot to a
different device than the one specified during the Linux installation,
an Illegal Opcode may intermittently occur after the reboot. The
Illegal Opcode is persistent until the system is recovered. On an HP
ProLiant G6-series server, an Illegal Opcode is displayed as a red
screen with an Illegal Opcode message in addition to the contents of
the system registers. For other HP ProLiant servers, the server will
stop responding, or GRUB will display a message on the screen." (see
link for alternate resolution)

hth,
-paul

[Paul Morgan]

after searching through our internal issue tracker, i found this comment, too:

"keep in mind I have seen red screens happen on many servers if you
let the PXE boot menu option time out and there's no OS on the server,
but upon building the server the red screen normally will no longer
re-appear"