Build targets

iPXE is built using a command-line something like this:

  make bin/ipxe.pxe

The first part, bin in this case indicates platform. ipxe indicates driver, and .pxe indicates boot type.

  make [platform]/[driver].[extension]

The bin directory is included in git repo, but all platforms will be created automatically as part of the build process.

There are some other special targets as well.

Currently supported platforms are:

• bin (alias for bin-i386-pcbios)
• bin-i386-pcbios
• bin-i386-efi
• bin-i386-linux
• bin-x86_64-efi
• bin-x86_64-linux
• bin-x86_64-pcbios
• bin-arm32-efi
• bin-arm64-efi

-efi platforms can also have an additional -sb at the end. Used when submitting binaries for Secure Boot signing.

As the subtitle suggests this is the kind of driver to include in the build

• ipxe builds one binary with (almost) all PCI based NIC drivers that iPXE has (for now not working on arm since some interfaces have not yet been implemented there, build specific drivers instead such as snp)
• intel or other driver file found in the sources builds for that driver
• 808610de binary with driver for specific PCI device with given pci-id. See list of hardware expected to work.
• ecm--ncm double dash (--) adds multiple drivers to one file, in this case we pull in most USB based drivers (you can add double dash multiple times for more than two drivers)

Some commonly used variants and why:

• ipxe all native drivers, commonly used for usb based boot media or where iPXE is not used in a chainloaded manner.
• undionly driver used for building chainable iPXE for pcbios platforms (not included in ipxe since UNDI stack can't be reliably kept and still having device available for possible native iPXE driver) use with .kpxe extension
• snponly similar to undionly but for efi uses snp (Simple Network Protocol) or nii (Network Interface

Identifier Protocol) provided by something else in EFI land, should only find and boot the specific NIC device it was chained from.

• snp same as snponly but tries to boot all devices and not just the one it was chained via, this is also included in ipxe builds
• tests the Linux test suite example: make bin-x86_64-linux/tests.linux && ./bin-x86_64-linux/tests.linux post on mailinglist with more examples
• tap the Linux tap driver, use with .linux boot type

Determines what kind of header should be added to the binary and how entrypoints should be handled.

• make Same as make all
• make all Predefined list of most common targets and prints some helpfully suggestive message
• make everything tries to build targets for multiple platforms
• make vmware ROMs for VMware
• make doc Same as make bin/doc
• make [platform]/doc Builds doxygen documentation
• make docview Tries to open doxygen documentation in browser