PXE UEFI booting and installing

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We recently got a batch of DELL PE640s, and for fast storage opted for a superfast NVMe card of 3TB. That was almost the most expensive part of the whole order. Because the BIOS could not handle this card (or the other way around, the card would not do BIOS, only UEFI) we were forced to do UEFI boot, a first for the NDPF.

We install all our machines through PXE booting, and the configuration is managed by our trusty (legacy) quattor installation. This is based on pxelinux.cfg. For UEFI boot, we need a slightly different approach because the boot loader is a grub.


option arch code 93 = unsigned integer 16; # RFC4578

if option arch = 00:06 {
    filename "pxelinux/bootia32.efi";
} else if option arch = 00:07 {
    option tftp-server-name "stal.nikhef.nl";
    filename "pxelinux.cfg/bootx64.efi";
} else {
    option vendor-class-identifier "PXEClient";
    option vendor-encapsulated-options 01:04:00:00:00:00:ff;
    filename "pxelinux/pxelinux.0";
}