[Dnsmasq-discuss] dnsmasq-full: proxyDHCP chainloading does not work in OpenWRT since ver. 2.91

[Pawel K]

Hello All,

To be honest I don't know where to post the bugs related to dnsmasq.
On March 2026 I have raised a ticket in OpenWRT/package issues github.
https://github.com/openwrt/packages/issues/28938
So far, noone has been assigned to handle this.

Basically, I used sucessfully dnsmasq ver. 2.90-r4 in proxyDHCP mode
for chainloading iPXE and then its menu script and the final app.
My configuration was based on dhcp-match and pxe-service  in /etc/dnsmasq.conf file.
After upgrading OpenWRT to the latest release at that time, I have noticed
dnsmasq was updated to ver. 2.91-r1 and the same PXE config did not work anymore.
Then I confirmed the issue on another OpenWRT device, with the same dnsmasq version
and  this week I confirmed the issue still persist  with the latest ver. 2.93.
>From your changelog I noticed that there were a lot of changes in the PXE area in version 2.91.

Basically, the first stage of chainloading works OK.  iPXE is delivered to a client and is up and running. Then, for the next stage - a script delivery, client timeout occures.
>From OpenWRT side, in Processes tab I can see that dnsmasq processing is about ~90%.
No proxyDHCP communication from the device is visble in Wireshark anymore.  Dnsmasq is dead till the next device bootup.
This week I tested this with dnsmasq's tftp and external tftp (on another server).
The results are the same. So, tftp service is not a rootcause.
It appears that the DHCP Discovery command sent via iPXE causes dnsmasq to hang.

Could you be so kind and support this issue.

BTW. Although there are multiple tutors how to use dnsmasq for PXE based on pxe-boot configuration, so OpenWRT Luci interface as well, I have never managed to run dnsmasq this way. For me only pxe-serivce  in /etc/dnsmasq.conf file worked.

Kind regards,
Pawel K

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