pxe boot

[Guest]

I want to boot an XPe image from a linux server using PXE. However I cannot
download an image which is larger than 90 Mbyte.
On my linux server I am using ATFTP which can handle a maximum of 64k blocks.
On my client I am using NTLDR to get the image. NTLDR uses a fixed block
size of 1432 bytes. So, 64k blocks x 1432 bytes = 90 Mbytes.
Is there a version of NTLDR which uses a larger blocksize, f.i. 8k ?

 

[Guest]

Could you boot into GRUB and then use GRUB to select your XPe image as a
default with a short 5s timeout?

 

[Guest]

I do not have a harddisk or another kind of flash memory to boot from.
I can PXE boot with a pxelinux.0 and get my image. If this image is a linux
image everything works fine. If this image is a windows XP embedded it is
hard to do a live switch from linux to windows.
So the solution is to use NTLDR to get the image from the server using TFTP.
But here the small blocksize of NTLDR is the problem.
So I come back on my first question, I need a version of NTLD witch uses a
larger blocksize. For me this is a bug in NTLDR that it cannot negotiate
about a larger blocksize to use with large images.

And of course I can use another TFTP daemon on my server, like tftp-hpa.
This daemon can download more than 64k blocks, but it does not support
multicast.
I need the multicast option to keep downloads fast enough when f.i. 30
clients start downloading their image at the same time.

 

[Guest]

The maximum of blocks atftpd can download is 64k (65536). I changed the code
of the atftp daemon to allow the download of more blocks (now = 500.000)
which means that image files up to 700 Mbytes can be downloaded now.
ntldr is now able to get large image files from a linux server, however the
total download time is still too long (90 seconds for 200 Mbyte).
I can continue now developing my XPe image, but I still need the possibility
in ntldr to use a larger blocksize of 1432 bytes.
Can or will Microsoft do something about this issue?
By the way, ntldr is also not able to use a multicast download.