Continued problems booting FreeBSD from iPXE (now in VMware workstation)

[cracauer@]

For a long time I failed to boot FreeBSD from iPXE. That wasn't a problem until now, but now VMware workstation uses iPXE as the default (and only) PXE bootloader.

Basically the problem is that the parameters from DHCP are passed on to PXE in a way that they are not correctly parsed. You can see here how the "host" part is incorrectly extracted. I have the diff that's doing this debug print somewhere:

I had this problems years ago in Xen where iPXE can be replaced. I also have some individual PC BIOSes that fail in a similar manner (IIRC, no screenshots handy). Unless I'm doing something stupid this is probably worth cleaning up.

Does this look familiar to somebody? Am I doing something stupid?

 

[cpm@]

I guess you should probably do a git-bisect to figure out where it actually started to go wrong, and report to the iPXE developers, in case that you found it.

Also see the reference of PXE error codes (for Intel) that will help you to research the unbootable cause and possible fix.

Good luck!

PS. Are you aware of the CFT[1]?

To your case, I quote what is the more relevant so far:

> I have ~100 FreeBSD 8/9 VMs in my vSphere 5.1 environment, all using the
> VMware tools package from VMware. Everything has been running great for
> years.
> (we skipped vSphere 5.0). Why should I use this vmxnet driver instead of the
> VMware tools driver or the emulated e1000?
>

They are out of tree and subject to rotting. I had to use the patches
at [1] to even get them to compile on 9.1 and -current. I don't think
VMware puts much engineering resources behind it; there was a compiler
warning of a silly bug like:
if (foo) ;
do_something();

vmxnet3 has modern features LRO, IPv6 checksum offloading, etc that
the emulated e1000 lacks. In my test setup, e1000 tops out at 30MB/sec
but vmxnet3 goes to 50MB/sec. I'd like to hear other's experiences.

[1] - http://ogris.de/vmware/

[1] http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2013-August/043494.html.