FreeBSD 7 and ESXi

[Jeremy Chadwick]

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:

ftp://ftp4.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/ISO-IMAGES/7.1/

You can see the changes at the below Wiki (see very bottom of page):

http://wiki.freebsd.org/JeremyChadwick/Commonly_reported_issues

> 	It does not happen with i386 version.
> 	Which is the best release to install in this box? Should I go 
> ahead with i386?

If this is going to be a desktop box and uses an nVidia video card,
you should stay with i386 (if I remember correctly there are no
working amd64 nVidia drivers).

This won't allow you to use the full 8GB of RAM you have installed,
though, without building a custom kernel with PAE support (and there are
known compatibility problems between PAE and certain kernel drivers).
It's strongly recommended you stick with amd64 if at all possible.

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |