[syslinux] gpxelinux.0 and slow HTTP performance on VMware ESX VM

[Shantanu Gadgil]

Hi,
Please see my comments inline ... I too have faced similar problems ..

----- Original Message ----

Message: 1
Date: Wed, 29 Jun 2011 20:57:22 +0200
From: Schlomo Schapiro <syslinux at schlomo.schapiro.org>
To: syslinux at zytor.com
Subject: [syslinux] gpxelinux.0 and slow HTTP performance on VMware
    ESX VM
Message-ID: <4E0B7592.5060404 at schlomo.schapiro.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

Hi,

Unfortunately now I stumbled upon a problem where I am out of my wits and need
some help.

[Shantanu]: Yes ... exactly, many times I too face this! :) ;P


The core problem is that HTTP transfers by gpxelinux.0 are very slow. Sadly this
problem seems to be somehow related to our VMware ESX environment and I am not
able to pin the problem down.

[Shantanu]: The symptom on my end was ...

syslinux-4.10-pre14: The scan from the "mac_address_with_dashes" down to default 
would be very slow ...
HTTP transfers were sometimes slow, sometimes not.

This was seen when the TFTP server was inside a VM (ESXi/VirtualBox) but not 
when the TFTP server was a real machine.

So ... I end up going back to 4.05-preX

My current solution is to *just* do the vmlinuz/initrd loading via TFTP (it just 
works :)) for all the OSes and have the OS installation
configured to install via HTTP/NFS. This has been working quite smoothly so far.

The 4.10-preXX hit some issue or the other and I keep coming back to the 4.04 
(now testing 4.05-pre3) !!! :( :(

Cheers and Regards,
Shantanu