pxeboot.bs and vlan tagging

[Rick Miller]

See my responses inline...

On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 10:54 AM, Erik Nørgaard <norgaard at locolomo.org> wrote:
> On 06/02/2012 16:35, Rick Miller wrote:
>
>> We are PXE booting into FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE to perform system builds.
>> The pxeboot.bs file was recompiled with TFTP support.  8.2-RELEASE
>> builds were working fine until we attempted a build on bare metal in
>> an environment that utilizes vlan tagging.  When the system loaded the
>> pxeboot.bs file it prompted that a disk containing the mfsroot.gz be
>> inserted.
>
>
> Hi, a few questions:
>
> 1) do you use tftp or nfs? if you built pxeboot with tftp, did you also
> build the kernel with tftp?

pxeboot.bs was compiled with TFTP enabled.  We made 3 modifications to
the kernel not related to tftp.  One change was to the NIC source code
to improve small packet performance, we compiled a custom kernel that
disabled FLOWTABLE and enabled ROUTETABLES.

TFTP is the intent for PXE, we did not want to rely on NFS.  For the
remainder of the install, we've written code into sysinstall to
support pure HTTP installs.

> 2) do you fetch the kernel successfully?
>
> When using tftp, The kernel and kernel modules are fetched before the memory
> file system, so do pxeboot fetch the kernel but not the mfsroot?
>
> The reason for these questions is that your problem may be with the kernel
> and kernel modules and not pxeboot. Just to be sure.

I see what you are saying.  We will have to look at the packet
captures to make that determination.

>> I have a couple of questions that I am hoping I can use to glean a
>> proper solution:
>>
>> 1) Does the 8.2-RELEASE pxeboot.bs source code support use of vlan
>> tagging?
>> 2) Can I get vlan tagging support with newer 8.2 code?
>> 3) Will the 9.0-RELEASE code have better support for vlan tagging and
>> can I use it to build an 8.2-RELEASE system?
>
>
> I did a grep in the source and it seems there is a kernel module for vlan
> tagging, if you load the kernel succesfully it may be a question of getting
> that module loaded as well, or rebuild the kernel. But I can't give a better
> answer.
>
> My best guess is not to rely on vlan tagging unless you can configure that
> on the hardware. Or, normally there is a default vlan that corresponds to no
> tag. If you can configure that for pxe and use tagging for the other
> networks.

Thanks for this information, it has given me some other things to
think about and could potentially lead to a proper solution.

-- 
Take care
Rick Miller