Multi-arch installer

[Steffen Grunewald]

On Mon, 2022-05-09 at 21:50:23 -0700, Ian Eure wrote:
> I have some oddball hardware I want to use FAI on.  It has a 64-bit CPU, but
> its UEFI BIOS only supports 32-bits.  I can manually install with the Debian
> multi-arch image[1], which has a 32-bit bootloader, but correctly installs
> amd64 kernel and packages.
> 
> Is there a way to get FAI to do something similar?

I may not fully understand your problem, but wouldn't FAI just detect the
availability of UEFI (via /sys/)? Everything else should be handled by the
DHCP/TFTP server side (which is only closely related to FAI).
Whether there's a 64-bit system installed depends on the NFSROOT assigned.
But since you want to talk to the 32-bit UEFI first, perhaps the following
years-old snippet from my dhcpd.conf may point you in some direction:

...
## https://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php?title=PXELINUX#UEFI
    if substring(option vendor-class-identifier, 0, 20) = "PXEClient:Arch:00000" {
          filename "pxelinux.0";
    }
    if substring(option vendor-class-identifier, 0, 20) = "PXEClient:Arch:00006" {
          filename "syslinux32.efi";
    }
    if substring(option vendor-class-identifier, 0, 20) = "PXEClient:Arch:00007" {
          filename "syslinux64.efi";
    }
    if substring(option vendor-class-identifier, 0, 20) = "PXEClient:Arch:00009" {
          filename "syslinux64.efi";
    }
...

You may have to look for ldlinux.* and syslinux*.* files in various subtrees
provided by the syslinux-common package, and copy them into your TFTP tree.

HTH,
- S

-- 
Steffen Grunewald, Cluster Administrator
Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute)
Am Mühlenberg 1 * D-14476 Potsdam-Golm * Germany
~~~
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Mail: steffen.grunewald(at)aei.mpg.de
~~~