[syslinux] Problem with 90MB Initrd

Gene Cumm gene.cumm at gmail.com
Mon Sep 21 03:57:54 PDT 2015


On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 6:36 AM, Mathias Radtke <m.radtke at uib.de> wrote:

> On 21.09.2015 12:06, Gene Cumm wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 2:38 AM, Mathias Radtke <m.radtke at uib.de> wrote:

>>> The used TFTPD works fine with BIOS machines.
>>> I have two Initrd images. One is 64bit and almost 90MB and the 32bit is
>>> 85MB.
>>> I know that some tftpd have limitations and I use one of these. I am
>>> aware
>>> of the problem.
>>
>> What's the exact file size in bytes?  I presume you've done BIOS boots
>> with your 64-bit kernel/initrd and those succeed?
>
> Yes booting with a BIOS machine works fine for both architectures.
> Here's the size:
> 87146093 miniroot-20150917.bz2
> 91362629 miniroot-x64-20150917.bz2

Thanks for the confirmation.

>> Have you considered HTTP transfer?
>
> Currently not as we are bound to the currently used tftp.

Adding DHCP option 210, forcibly or inside DHCP option 43
vendor-options, could redirect Syslinux to grab ldlinux.e64 and later
files over HTTP.

>> What do you observe?  Does it transfer the file then the Linux kernel
>> crashes?  Does it spontaneously reboot before completing the
>> operation?
>
> The client is a VSphere VM Client.
> It displayes the IP Address and then:
> Loading Kernel..... ok
> Loading initrd.bz2...
>
> This stalls for minutes and the client reboots afterwards.

Been there.  I don't know if it's specific to the VMware-based VMs or
not, yet.  It keeps slowing down its responses, eventually getting a
lot of retransmissions in the loop and then hits the 5-minute timeout
mark and spontaneously reboots.

>> Have you tried doing a packet capture to see how far this client
>> progresses?

Probably no need to do a packet capture as I've seen this myself and
moved to HTTP.  HTTP transfer beat out any of my TFTP transfers and
was quite successful.

>> What tftpd?  Have you reviewed the logs for partial transfers?
>
> atftpd
> here's the syslog output.

..snip

> The .c32 files transfered are EFI64 files. I just copied them into the root
> directory for testing purposes. As soon as the images load I will organize
> the structure properly

I could have asked what version but since you've finally described the
symptoms sufficiently, I'm already aware it won't matter.

-- 
-Gene


More information about the Syslinux mailing list