[gPXE] Transfer speed with e1000 and pcnet32 in VMware

[Shao Miller]

Joakim Schicht wrote:
> I am fiddling with WAN (HTTP) booting of "Universal XP". By wimbooting 
> xp, we can enjoy great compression and faster image transfer (my 
> rather complete XP SP2 with all services intact, is only 209 Mb after 
> finally being zipped).
Interesting.  How exactly are you accomplishing this?  What exactly are 
you downloading via HTTP?  I was under the impression that the entirety 
of XP could not be in a .WIM file and be bootable, though you can attach 
a .WIM file at some point during boot.  If you have a relevant link to 
your setup over at the Boot-Land forums, perhaps you would kindly reply 
with such a link here for other interested gPXE Windows XP users?

For comparison, I have a 204 MB XP SP2 HDD image which I boot using 
MEMDISK and WinVBlock.  Each computer which boots this image is licensed 
for a single installation of Windows XP SP2.  The BOOT.INI menu offers 
all kernel and HAL combinations, so the image will boot on any hardware 
platform with enough RAM.  256 MB is enough to run, but many programs 
cannot allocate memory and have quirks; CMD.EXE is fine.  In this 
scenario, I have gPXE attach to a read-only SAN.  That SAN has a FAT32 
partition and SYSLINUX installed onto it.  SYSLINUX boots and loads 
MEMDISK along with the "RamXP" HDD image.  The fact that gPXE uses iSCSI 
to read this SAN results in significantly faster transfer times than 
HTTP, but obviously is not quite as universal as HTTP allowances in the 
world.

> But using another stack than gPXE in the same environment (even with 
> no physical nic connected) will not trigger this stall behaviour. 
> Which leads me to think that it could be some weird combination.
Using another stack, how are you downloading via HTTP?
> Either way, it is definately a vmware-related issue.
If gPXE is really behaving differently than some other PXE stack which 
accomplishes decent HTTP download behaviour, it would still be good to 
know why.

- Shao Miller
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