PXE Booting the Rocky Linux Installer

Installer Kernels

Rocky Linux maintains installer kernels that are a lightweight way to load the installer and stream packages over the network as needed. Rocky Linux is a binary compatible clone of RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and is already supported by numerous large, financially strong sponsors.

The installer kernels are located at:

URL	Description
`http://dl.rockylinux.org`	Base URL for Rocky Linux mirrors
`pub/rocky/${version}/BaseOS/${arch}/os/images/pxeboot/`	Directory containing the installer kernels
`${version}`	Version (e.g., 8, 9, etc)
`${arch}`	Architecture (e.g., x86_64, aarch64)
`vmlinuz`	Kernel filename
`initrd.img`	Initrd filename

In order to load them, you'll need to use a boot snippet in iPXE similar to:

set install_params inst.ks=http://my.kickstart.com/ks.cfg inst.repo=http://dl.rockylinux.org/pub/rocky/${version}/BaseOS/${arch}/os
set mirror http://dl.rockylinux.org
set base_dir pub/rocky
set version 9
set arch x86_64
set dir ${mirror}/${base_dir}/${version}/BaseOS/${arch}/os/images/pxeboot

kernel ${dir}/vmlinuz ${install_params} -- quiet
initrd ${dir}/initrd.img
boot

If you want to use a Kickstart URL for automation, you can add this to the kernel line:

set ksurl http://my.kickstart.com/ks.cfg
inst.ks=${ksurl}

For more examples, you can view the netboot.xyz configuration for Rocky Linux here.

Installer Kernels​

Installer Kernels