[PATCH] support for gPXE and esxi5

John Paget Bourke john.bourke at mobileinternet.com
Fri Dec 2 01:53:42 UTC 2011


Hi,

Found it !

The following pxe images DO NOT cause the ESXi install to hang 

-rw-r--r--  1 root root  60928 Dec  2 01:38 menu.c32
-rw-r--r--  1 root root  26828 Dec  2 01:39 pxelinux.0

The following pxe images cause the ESXi install to hang with fatal error: 10 (out of resources) at tools.t00

-rw-r--r--  2 root root  39188 Apr 28  2009 menu.c32
-rw-r--r--  2 root root  14716 Apr 28  2009 pxelinux.0

No idea as yet which versions each of these are.  The first ones are most likely the most recent

[root at Config tftpboot]# rpm -qa | grep syslinux
syslinux-4.02-4.el6.x86_64

The second one may be the one that comes with RHEL.  Did I install cobbler before updating syslinux ?

Next question is why gPXE has the same problem.  

I am using

-rw-r--r--  1 root root  61361 Nov 30 09:33 undionly.kpxe

Maybe I need to try some different versions ?

Thanks

John



-----Original Message-----
From: John Paget Bourke [mailto:john.bourke at mobileinternet.com] 
Sent: 01 December 2011 13:21
To: 'cobbler mailing list'
Subject: RE: [PATCH] support for gPXE and esxi5

Sorry, My mistake, 

PXE/ESXi 5 - OK
gPXE/ESXi 5 - Not OK
gPXE/ESXi 5/ESXi 5 - OK

It is an Intel card, Desktop Pro 1G.

I will start looking at some variations and try them out.  There may be some different gPXE builds I can do.  Maybe there is some UNDI variation.

Also an interesting comment from this blog

http://blog.markusbordihn.de/2009/04/gpxe-and-localboot.html

"Because pxelinux will unload from the memory before it load the chain.c32 it works without any problems and also the localboot has the full avalible memory"

I am wondering if gPXE somehow operates within it's own memory restricted environment.

Thanks

John


-----Original Message-----
From: cobbler-bounces at lists.fedorahosted.org [mailto:cobbler-bounces at lists.fedorahosted.org] On Behalf Of James Cammarata
Sent: 01 December 2011 13:10
To: cobbler mailing list
Subject: Re: [PATCH] support for gPXE and esxi5

On Thu, Dec 1, 2011 at 5:47 AM, John Paget Bourke <john.bourke at mobileinternet.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> If I manually install ESXi on my hardware and then create an ESXi VM inside (ESXi on ESXi), then try build from Cobbler with gPXE, it works !!!
>
> So gPXE/ESXi 5 - OK
> So gPXE/ESXi 5 - Not OK
> So gPXE/ESXi 5/ESXi 5 - OK
>
> So it must be some kind of hardware issue, some strange interaction between gPXE and ESXi on that hardware ?
>
> Maybe I need to put this to the gPXE people ?

Is it an Intel NIC? I vaguely remember seeing a post somewhere about Intel cards allocating a huge amount of buffers, causing issues when booting on a kvm guest, however I can't seem to find it now.

Also, I'm not 100% clear on which situations are working for you and which ones aren't - #1 and #2 seem to be the same.
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