[syslinux] mboot.c32, NUMA and tgz

[Hansen, Timbonicus]

Hi all,

I'm attempting to PXE boot ESXi, which uses the syslinux mboot.c32 module. The mboot.c32 included with ESXi seems to be an older version that runs into an "out of memory loading.." problem halfway through, even though the box has 8GB memory. This may be related to NUMA, since it works fine on an older box but not the newer blade. I saw that some non-contiguous memory issues have been fixed in newer versions of syslinux and tried replacing the mboot.c32 with the 3.82 release, but now it seems to hang forever when loading a .tgz file.

Does mboot.c32 support tgz out of the box, or is this something VMware added in for ESXi? Do I need to recompile mboot or otherwise do something special to enable it? Is there a workaround for the previous memory issue?

Thanks,

Tim Hansen
timbonicus.hansen at hp.com