Need help pxebooting FreeBSD under virtualbox-ose-3.1.6_2

[Lawrence Stewart]

Hi all,

As the subject suggests, I'm having issues getting PXE booting working. 
I have a working PXE/NFS setup (verified using a physical machine on the 
LAN) that doesn't work in vbox.

The vm is set to use bridged networking mode and the PCnet-FAST III 
adapter type. I've experimented with various permutations of 
FreeBSD/Freebsd 64bit guest OS version, IO APIC, PAE/NX, VT-x and nested 
paging, all to no avail.

The pxeboot code I'm predominantly testing with is compiled from a 
recent version of head. I have also tried pxeboots from the 8-CURRENT 
and 8-STABLE eras. The vm starts up, pulls the pxeboot file via TFTP and 
then errors out with the message "TFTP download complete, but\nUnable to 
load file."

I've tested on Windows XP vbox and it gets a bit further, successfully 
running the pxeboot code, but craps out when it gets to loading the 
kernel. I tested with both recent head and 8-stable kernels and it just 
freezes when when the '|' character shows up and is about to start spinning.

If I could get the FreeBSD vbox vm to the point where it too can boot 
our pxeboot code, that would be a great step.

I found the thread at [1] and tried the suggestions in the linked 
thread. Applying the etherboot patch to etherboot distributed with vbox 
makes no difference at all, and Kib's patched pxeboot code [2] kind of 
manages to successfully run after the same "Unable to load file" message 
is printed, but is completely broken, spewing messages about "netboot: 
couldn't probe pxenet0" and "pxe_open: netif_open() failed" to the 
console. I'm guessing the trick is somehow related to the vbox PXE boot 
rom not interacting well with our pxeboot code, but I have no idea how 
to resolve this.

Any words of wisdom on how to get this working? Anyone even managed to 
successfully pxeboot FreeBSD in vbox?

Cheers,
Lawrence

[1] 
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-emulation/2009-September/006806.html

[2] 
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-emulation/2007-April/003509.html