[syslinux] mboot.c32, NUMA and tgz

[Hansen, Timbonicus]

Gene,

I'm working with ESXi 4.0 right now. I've run across a number of experimental PXE setups for ESXi, but I hadn't seen the PDF that you linked before. This may be helpful as it mentions using a current syslinux, which I'm anticipating is the solution to my problem. The ESXi PXE install is working on most of our boxes, we just ran into the strange memory issue on one particular model that must be feeding the older syslinux a strange memory map.

I'll take a look at the PDF and see where that gets me. Thanks!

Tim Hansen
timbonicus.hansen at hp.com


-----Original Message-----
From: syslinux-bounces at zytor.com [mailto:syslinux-bounces at zytor.com] On Behalf Of Gene Cumm
Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2009 1:49 PM
To: For discussion of Syslinux and tftp-hpa
Subject: Re: [syslinux] mboot.c32, NUMA and tgz

On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 12:25 PM, Hansen,
Timbonicus<timbonicus.hansen at hp.com> wrote:
> 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.
>

Which version of ESXi?  Are you using the current version for the
hardware you have?  If your server meets the x64 requirements that
VMware laid down for ESXi 4.0, you should use 4.0.  Otherwise,
3.5.0u5.  I believe there are a few first-generation x64 processors
that don't meet the requirements.  These updated versions resolve your
issue.

ESXi 3.5.0u4 introduced PXE booting as an experimental feature.  See
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1008971 for details on this.  See also
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1009034 for file extraction (You've probably
already stumbled on this or similar docs).

In ESXi 4.0, it is still (unfortunately) experimental.  See
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsp_4_pxe_boot_esxi.pdf for information.
This may be a less-known and almost private PDF as searching in Google
for a link shows only a link from vsphere-land.com.

One can only hope they find a nice solution soon as this would be a
nice feature.  All it should need (down the road; don't know if
they're doing this) are the boot files and either to know where the
vCenter server is for configuration or a small config 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

-- 
-Gene

"No one ever says, 'I can't read that ASCII E-mail you sent me.'"

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