FreeBSD 7 and ESXi

[John Baldwin]

On Tuesday 14 October 2008 08:20:22 am scuba at centroin.com.br wrote:
> Jeremy,
> 
> On Mon, 13 Oct 2008, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> 
> |On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 02:44:13AM -0300, scuba at centroin.com.br wrote:
> |> On Mon, 13 Oct 2008, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> |> 
> |> |On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 02:04:07AM -0300, scuba at centroin.com.br wrote:
> |> |> Jeremy,
> |> |> 
> |> |> On Mon, 13 Oct 2008, Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
> |> |> 
> |> |> |On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 12:54:26AM -0300, scuba at centroin.com.br 
wrote:
> |> |> |> 	I'm facing some problems trying to install a FreeBSD 
> |> |> |> 7.0-RELEASE-amd64, on a Dell PE 2950III, dual Xeon Quad core, 8GB 
RAM.
> |> |> |> 	After (FBSD) boot menu count down, it shows a dump of the CPU 
> |> |> |> registers and a message: BTX Halted. No matter what is changed in 
VM 
> |> |> |> setup.
> |> |> |
> |> |> |Can you please download the 7.1-BETA2 ISO and try it instead?  There
> |> |> |have been changes to the FreeBSD boot loader between 7.0-RELEASE and
> |> |> |7.1-BETA2 which may improve things for you.  The 7.1-BETA2 ISOs are
> |> |> |available here:
> |> |> 
> |> |> 	The same behavior with 7.1-BETA2.
> |> |
> |> |I'm not sure what to do at this point, or what to tell you, since the
> |> |kernel can't even load.
> |> |
> |> |Are you installing this off of CD, and is the CD drive hooked up to
> |> |the PC via ATA/SATA (rather than USB or something else)?
> |> 
> |> 	It's a bit more complicated, since, for some reason the Vmware 
> |> client is unable to boot the VM from CD on the host server. It's 
> |> booting an ISO image on the client machine.
> |> 	I already read something saying that it's a known issue of the 
> |> ESXi.
> |> 	Without the virtulization layer, the amd64 CD boots without 
> |> problems in this machine. 
> |
> |Ah, so the truth comes out... :-)
> |
> |Have you brought this fact up with the VMware folks?  They're quite a
> |nice bunch, I wouldn't be surprised if they provided a hotfix for you
> |for this problem.
> 
> 	This will be my next step.
> 	I sent here first, once it's a boot loader problem, specific to 
> 64bits version of Fbsd. I thought someone could faced the same and came 
> with a howto to workaround.
> 
> Thank you anyway. :-)

It sounds like vmware is not emulating 64-bit CPUs, but only 32-bit CPUs.

-- 
John Baldwin