[syslinux] Syslinux EFI + TFTPBOOT Support

[Gene Cumm]

On Sun, Mar 9, 2014 at 8:09 AM, Gene Cumm <gene.cumm at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 8, 2014 at 12:39 PM, Gene Cumm <gene.cumm at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mar 8, 2014 10:08 AM, "Gene Cumm" <gene.cumm at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> vNIC not VMNet.  AMD PCNet32 vlance, Intel e1000, Intel e1000e, VMware
>>> VMXNet3?  Feel free to directly email me your .vmx file if you don't know.
>>
>> So that should be vlance or flexible (which can be PCNet32 or e1000).  Could
>> you verify with a real OS?
>
> I finally got the opportunity to test your VMX and I can see the same
> issue.  Interestingly, I also see issues with booting from the second
> NIC (null IP)
>
>> I see it has two cores per socket. Is it one socket? What exact make/model
>> is the CPU in the host? You might be choking the VM.  Have you considered
>> just 1 socket and 1 core per socket?

1) My assumption would be that the VMware virtualized AMD 79C970A
(PCNet32 driver; vlance virtualDev) lacks proper EFI64 support.

2) I have 0 speed issues using your VMX.  If you only have two real
cores for this 2vCPU VM, you're choking it as the host needs time to
run.  If you choke it, you mess with timers.  If you mess with timers,
interface polling and a HUGE slew of items (including a guest OS's
clock) will be slowed to a crawl.

In my experience (both on ESXi and VMware Workstation), gGeneral
sizing guidelines are that the first core on the first socket and
1-2GiB RAM should be considered dedicated to the host and arbitrary
VMs should not have a vCPU count greater than the number of cores of
an available socket and the vRAM should not exceed the RAM directly
available to the NUMA node of the socket.  2 Intel Xeon x54xx
constitute 1 NUMA node so you can have (1) 4vCPU VM with most of the
RAM of the entire server.  2 Intel Xeon x55xx constitute 2 NUMA nodes
so you can up to the vCPU count of the number of available cores in a
socket and up to the available RAM directly controlled by that socket.
 If we had 2 Intel Xeon E5530 with (6) 8GiB DIMMs, the best we could
do for a single VM on this otherwise idle host is 4vCPUs and 22-24 GiB
RAM.

-- 
-Gene