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fataldarkness
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Unexpected early boot module when booting ESXi 6.5 via PXE

Hi all, I am attempting to boot ESXi via a linux PXE server. It appears however that ESXi is purple screening while loading modules. Immediately after it begins loading the vmkernel I get this message:

Capture.PNG

Can anyone help me interpret this? Google searches of the second line returned nothing useful and searches with parts of that line in quotes returned nothing. Any insight into how I can fix this would be greatly appreciated.

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dariusd
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It looks like the module names are case-sensitive when Secure Boot is enabled.  Somehow, chardevs.b00 has been changed to CHARDEVS.B00, and that is sufficient to trigger a check in the strict validation performed when UEFI Secure Boot is enabled on the host.

I'm curious as to how the module filenames ended up in uppercase.  I suspect that changing them back to lowercase (on the TFTP server and/or in the boot configuration file) will allow ESXi to boot correctly with UEFI Secure Boot enabled on the host.

Cheers,

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Darius

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dariusd
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It looks like the module names are case-sensitive when Secure Boot is enabled.  Somehow, chardevs.b00 has been changed to CHARDEVS.B00, and that is sufficient to trigger a check in the strict validation performed when UEFI Secure Boot is enabled on the host.

I'm curious as to how the module filenames ended up in uppercase.  I suspect that changing them back to lowercase (on the TFTP server and/or in the boot configuration file) will allow ESXi to boot correctly with UEFI Secure Boot enabled on the host.

Cheers,

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Darius

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fataldarkness
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I will give that a try and report back. I am not too sure why everything is uppercase, my image came this way so I assumed it was just VMWare changing things up.

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dariusd
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How did you access the contents of the .iso file?  They should generally all be in lower-case.  I don't believe we have made any relevant changes to the disc structure lately.

If in doubt, it might be worth validating the sha1/sha256 checksum of the .iso file in case there's some filesystem corruption.

Cheers,

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Darius

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fataldarkness
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I will certainly be verifying them but that will have to wait until later. I have been opening the iso files using 7Zip on windows 10. Both the iso image for 6.0.0 and 6.5.0 that I have downloaded have all files in uppercase. Are there any known issues with using 7Z to open these files?

I also made sure everything was lowercase and it appears to work correctly now, thank you.

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dariusd
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Are there any known issues with using 7Z to open these files?

Just that it doesn't map the filenames to lower-case like everyone else does.  Known as of a few minutes ago.  Smiley Wink

It's interesting... I don't see anything that strictly requires the filenames on the ESXi image to be presented as lower-case.  They are recorded in upper-case on the .iso image (it's a requirement of the ISO 9660 filesystem format), but Linux's ISO9660 driver maps them to lower-case for us.  We should probably add the necessary extended attributes (Rock Ridge?  Joliet?  I don't recall) to force them to lower-case on the CD image, so this might have been our fault after all.

Glad that you've gotten things going there without too much further hassle.

Cheers,

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Darius

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virtualDD
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I just wanted to contribute here that I've had issues with lower/uppercase characters in the past as well (see: Custom HPE ESXi 6.0 U2 (April 2016) breaks PXEboot with Kickstart Approach )

I think it would be great if the esxi isos were coded with Rock Ridge/Joliet to make this easier in the future.

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dariusd
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Thanks for the feedback!  I agree, and I have filed a bug report to request that we add Rock Ridge/Joliet to the images.  (I'd hoped it would have been as simple as adding a command-line option or two to mkisofs/genisoimage here, but it doesn't seem that straightforward to fix, sadly.  We'll see.)

Cheers,

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Darius

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Gidrakos
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Resurrecting an old thread here but I just wanted to note that this same thing happened with ESXi 6.7 for me today. I downloaded the iso, extracted the files to my tftp server, curious as to why they were all caps, then proceeded to run into multiple setup issues until finally hitting this same error and solution. Thanks for posting this!

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amilam
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I have the same problem sporadically PXE booting 6.7U1, always erroring on nvmxnet3.  On the same hardware, PXE to 6.5u1 does not error.

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