Slow PXE boot

[Mark Saad]

Domagoj 
   I regularly boot 11.3-Stable and 12.1-Stable amd64 on servers with 64gb, 128gb , and occasional more . I do t have that issue . Can you take a peak at the switch your boxes are attached to ; It sounds like a device is running at 100mb 1/2 duplex . I remember the realtec nics doing this when set to auto . 

---
Mark Saad | nonesuch at longcount.org

> On Feb 23, 2020, at 9:23 PM, Domagoj Smolčić <rank1seeker at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Yo Crew!
> 
> During PXE boot, from server (11.3-RELEASE-p5 i386) with 1 GB RAM, client with:
>    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, this 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="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="16384"' > /PXE/boot/loader.conf
>    Changing value to ANY value other than default 1024, completely halts client'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 to 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 Smolčić
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