Date: Mon, 24 Feb 2020 03:23:00 +0100 From: Domagoj =?UTF-8?Q?Smol=C4=8Di=C4=87?= <rank1seeker@gmail.com> To: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Slow PXE boot Message-ID: <20200224032300.00006290@gmail.com>
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Yo Crew!
During PXE boot, from server (11.3-RELEASE-p5 i386) with 1 GB RAM, client w=
ith:
4 GB RAM booted kernel in ~2 min
8 GB RAM booted kernel in ~20 min (at least)
So all below is tested with 2 different clients, each with NIC of different=
manufacturer (Realtec & Intel)
I've read on forums that if client has much, much more RAM than server, thi=
s happens.
Suggestion was to to set loader(8) tunable hw.memtest.tests to 0, so client=
would skip RAM test.
PXE boot is served to clients from /PXE, so ...
Setting hw.memtest.tests=3D"0" in /PXE/boot/loader.conf, yielded no results!
By the way, for some reason, hw.memtest.tests tunable DOESN'T exist in man =
pages!
I had to look in source code to confirm it still exists.
Next, I've tried:
# echo 'nfs.read_size=3D"16384"' > /PXE/boot/loader.conf
Changing value to ANY value other than default 1024, completely halts c=
lient's kernel loading at 'Loading kernel...'!
Lastly, I've tried tactic used with UFS's stage 2 /boot/boot, to skip stage=
3 loader completely and to directly load kernel instead.
So in dhcpd.conf, I've replaced:
filename "boot/pxeboot";
with:
filename "boot/kernel/kernel";
Result:
Attempt to pull GENERIC kernel directly, resulted in: "NBP is too big t=
o fit in free base memory"
Maybe I should try to compile custom minimal kernel 'ident PXE' ...
It is unbelievable how many problems do I have ...
Domagoj Smol=C4=8Di=C4=87
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