[syslinux] Syslinux EFI + TFTPBOOT Support

[Gene Cumm]

On Sun, Mar 9, 2014 at 8:48 PM, Steven Shiau <steven at nchc.org.tw> wrote:

> On 2014/3/10 上午 05:48, Gene Cumm wrote:
>>
>> 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
>
> Hi Gene,
> Thanks for your explanation. Today I did two more tests here. All were done
> with Syslinux 6.03-pre6.
> First one is for the real machine (Lenovo X230, Intel CPU core i5, NIC is
> Intel Corporation 82579LM Gigabit Network Connection (rev 04).
> The 2nd one is for VMWare WS 10 with 1 core client. The host machine uses
> Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4770 CPU @ 3.40GHz with hyper-thread on, so 8 cores

No, this is 8 execution contexts (CPU threads) on 4 execution cores.
Thanks for trying 1vCPU.

> shown in /proc/cpuinfo.
> I describe the results in the following:
> (1) For the Lenovo X230, I have the issue to EFI network booting. The client
> machine stopped at:
> =================
> Getting cached packet
> My IP is 192.168.1.1
> =================
> The system log on the server shows:
> =================
> Mar 10 08:09:32 drbldbn dhcpd: Client 3c:97:e:9b:75:46 requests
> 1:2:3:4:5:6:c:d:f:11:12:16:17:1c:28:29:2a:2b:32:33:36:3a:3b:3c:42:43:61:80:81:82:83:84:85:86:87
> - PXEClient:Arch:00007:UNDI:003016 - no dhcp-client-id
> Mar 10 08:09:32 drbldbn dhcpd: DHCPREQUEST for 192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.182)
> from 3c:97:0e:9b:75:46 via eth1
> Mar 10 08:09:32 drbldbn dhcpd: DHCPACK on 192.168.1.1 to 3c:97:0e:9b:75:46
> via eth1
> Mar 10 08:09:32 drbldbn atftpd[4821]: Serving bootx64.efi to
> 192.168.1.1:1549
> Mar 10 08:09:32 drbldbn atftpd[4821]: Serving bootx64.efi to
> 192.168.1.1:1550
> Mar 10 08:12:02 drbldbn dhcpd: DHCPREQUEST for 192.168.1.1 from
> 3c:97:0e:9b:75:46 via eth1
> Mar 10 08:12:02 drbldbn dhcpd: DHCPACK on 192.168.1.1 to 3c:97:0e:9b:75:46
> via eth1
> =================
> As you can tell, the client did not request ldlinux.e64.

The best way to verify is a port mirror packet capture.

> (2) For the VM with one core,
> The system log on the server shows:
> =================

> Mar 10 08:13:14 drbldbn atftpd[4821]: Serving vmlinuz-pxe to
> 192.168.120.3:1553
> Mar 10 08:13:17 drbldbn atftpd[4821]: Serving initrd-pxe.img to
> 192.168.120.3:1554
> Mar 10 08:14:25 drbldbn dhcpd: Client 0:c:29:68:f3:23 requests
> 1:3:6:c:f:1c:2a - DRBLClient - no dhcp-client-id
> =================
> As you can see, with one core this time it took longer to download
> initrd-pxe.img.

There's no indication how long it takes to fetch the file.  The only
indication is the time between when the client begins to fetch the
initrd and when the booted OS does its DHCP (1m8s if I'm reading
correctly while 3s between vmlinuz-pxe and initrd-pxe.img).

> For the Lenovo client, any test I could do?
> Thanks in advance.


On Sat, Mar 8, 2014 at 10:20 PM, Steven Shiau <steven at nchc.org.tw> wrote:

> Mar  9 10:36:25 drbldbn atftpd[10590]: Serving vmlinuz-pxe to
> 192.168.120.3:1830
> Mar  9 10:36:28 drbldbn atftpd[10590]: Serving initrd-pxe.img to
> 192.168.120.3:1831
> Mar  9 10:37:32 drbldbn dhcpd: Client 0:c:29:68:f3:23 requests
> 1:3:6:c:f:1c:2a - DRBLClient - no dhcp-client-id

3s between vmlinuz-pxe and initrd-pxe.img while 1m4s between
initrd-pxe.img and DHCP.

> Mar  9 11:04:08 drbldbn atftpd[10590]: Serving vmlinuz-pxe to
> 192.168.120.3:49172
> Mar  9 11:04:08 drbldbn atftpd[10590]: Serving initrd-pxe.img to
> 192.168.120.3:49173
> Mar  9 11:04:14 drbldbn dhcpd: Client 0:c:29:68:f3:23 requests
> 1:3:6:c:f:1c:2a - DRBLClient - no dhcp-client-id

<1s between vmlinuz-pxe and initrd-pxe.img while 6s between
initrd-pxe.img and DHCP and still the same server.

-- 
-Gene