Initial deployment

We strongly recommend following these official instructions. The official guide has a lot of collaborative effort put into covering all of the edge cases and is regularly tested. Following these instructions to the letter without skipping, reordering or adding any steps will give you a proper Dasharo installation unless there's a hardware issue. We strongly recommend against following unofficial guides deviating in any way from the official instructions.

If you have trouble with the installation process, ask for help on the official Dasharo chat channel. There are almost always people around willing to help with it. Before asking for help, make an attempt to follow the guide on your own and then ask for help with anything you get stuck on.

Hardware preparation

Please use Supermicro Quick Reference Guide for you mainboard e.g. X11SSH-TF. Find JPME2 and change its state to position 2-3, which means ME Manufacturing Mode enabled.

Booting DTS over network

For seamless and storageless deployment one can use BMC virtual floppy functionality to mount a floppy image containing iPXE.

iPXE will allow to boot DTS over network without much effort. The image file can be downloaded from 3mdeb FTP server. If you wish to build the image, please follow instructions in Building iPXE floppy image section.

To boot from the iPXE image, please do the following:

Download or build the iPXE image on your host machine.
Log in to the BMC dashboard.
Select the floppy image through Browse button:
Upload image to the BMC in the Virtual Media panel, by clicking Upload:
Go to Remote Control -> iKVM/HTML5 and start iKVM/HTML5 remote control window.
Use Power Control -> Set Power On
Enter Boot Menu with F11.
Select UEFI: ATEN Virtual Floppy 3000, Partition 1.
Wait for the embedded menu to show up (it may take up to 30 seconds for the UEFI protocols to execute during iPXE initialization - proprietary UEFI banzai...).
Choose Dasharo Tools Suite from the menu:

------------------------ Dasharo Network Boot Menu ------------------------
Autoboot (DHCP)
Dasharo Tools Suite
OS installation (netboot.xyz official server)
iPXE Shell

Vendor BIOS backup

Please follow DTS backup guide.

Installing Dasharo with DTS

TBD

Building iPXE floppy image

To create a floppy disk image for Supermicro BMC Virtual Media, you will need a Linux OS with docker installed. Then follow steps below:

Compile iPXE (a sample revision has been taken from top of master branch on 25.01.2023, iPXE unfortunately stopped tagging the code in December 2020). Following set of commands will embed Dasharo iPXE menu script, enable HTTPS and EFI image support and provide custom build ID command to ensure build reproducibility:

Clone iPXE repository:

git clone https://github.com/ipxe/ipxe.git

cd ipxe

git checkout 4bffe0f0d9d0e1496ae5cfb7579e813277c29b0f

NOTE: As mentioned above this is sample revision since iPXE code is not tagged.

Get Dasharo menu for network booting.

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Dasharo/dasharo-blobs/46cc16f6d8f0ed9d057fdd20f15bb89ce5b8d212/dasharo/dasharo.ipxe

Modify iPXE build configuration through general.h

sed "s|//#define\s*IMAGE_SCRIPT.*|#define IMAGE_SCRIPT|" src/config/general.h > src/config/general.h.tmp
mv src/config/general.h.tmp src/config/general.h
sed "s|.*DOWNLOAD_PROTO_HTTPS|#define DOWNLOAD_PROTO_HTTPS|g" src/config/general.h > src/config/general.h.tmp
mv src/config/general.h.tmp src/config/general.h
sed "s|.*IMAGE_EFI|#define IMAGE_EFI|g" src/config/general.h > src/config/general.h.tmp
mv src/config/general.h.tmp src/config/general.h

Use coreboot-sdk container to build iPXE binry:

docker run --rm -it -v $PWD:/home/coreboot/ipxe -w /home/coreboot/ipxe \
         coreboot/coreboot-sdk:2022-12-18_3b32af950d /bin/bash

Inside container: make sure you use correct cross-toolchain:

export CROSS_COMPILE="x86_64-elf-"

Inside container: start compailation:

make -C src bin-x86_64-efi-sb/ipxe.efi EMBED=$PWD/dasharo.ipxe BUILD_ID_CMD="echo 0x1234567890" \
    EXTRA_CFLAGS="-Wno-address-of-packed-member  -m64  -fuse-ld=bfd \
    -Wl,--build-id=none -fno-delete-null-pointer-checks -Wlogical-op -march=nocona \
    -malign-data=abi -mcmodel=large -mno-red-zone -fno-pic"

Exit docker container with exit command.

Create image file:

dd if=/dev/zero of=ipxe.img count=1 bs=1440K

Make FAT filesystem on the image file:
```
sudo mkfs.fat --mbr=y ipxe.img
```
Mount the image file:
```
sudo mount ipxe.img /mnt
```

Copy the iPXE to the mounted image file:

sudo mkdir -p /mnt/EFI/BOOT/ && \
    sudo cp src/bin-x86_64-efi-sb/ipxe.efi /mnt/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI

Unmount the image file:
```
sudo umount /mnt
```

The resulting ipxe.img file is now ready to be attached as Virtual Media on Supermicro BMC.