News

ESXi-Arm Fling 1.15 Refresh

We have released a small update to the ESXi-Arm Fling today to address some issues reported by the community. New installs and upgrades from a previous installation of the ESXi-Arm 1.x Fling are supported, using the installer or the offline bundle.

Tip: if your evaluation period has expired, you can perform a new installation; choose to preserve the VMFS filesystems, and register your VMs again.

Changes in this release

  • Support Virtual CPU Performance Counters.
  • Fix Virtual UEFI for the Arm Architecture Compliance Suite.
  • Update EQOS driver:
    • Fix byte-swapped MAC address (important note below!)
    • Add IEEE 802.3x flow control support
  • Support for PCIe devices on Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (important note below!)
  • Report Arm DEN0028 defined SoC version and revision (as returned by the SMCCC_ARCH_SOC_ID SMC call) via telemetry.

As usual the ESXi-Arm packages are available for download from the ESXi-Arm VMware Customer Connect site.

Stay in touch!

You can also find updates from Twitter/X https://twitter.com/esxi_arm.

Please continue to engage with the community and report your issues on the VMTN Communities forum ESXi-Arm Fling discussions.

If you are running the Fling on a system not on this list, please let us know!

Finally, we do have a new email address to reach us: [email protected]

Virtual CPU Performance Counters

Guest OSes have now the possibility to access the CPU performance counters. They are disabled by default, and can be enabled in the VM Virtual Hardware configuration tab.

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/com.vmware.vsphere.vm_admin.doc/GUID-F920A3C7-3B42-4E78-8EA7-961E49AF479D.html

After installing the “linux-tools-generic” package on Ubuntu LTS:

root@ubuntu:~# perf stat -e instructions -e branch-misses ls

 Performance counter stats for 'ls':

           1896561      instructions
             11596      branch-misses

       0.001105120 seconds time elapsed

       0.001275000 seconds user
       0.000000000 seconds sys

EQOS byte-swapped MAC address fix

This update contains a fix for the configuration of the EQOS MAC address. It requires the UEFI firmware to be updated as well, with version 1.2 or later. See https://github.com/jaredmcneill/quartz64_uefi/releases.

Please be aware that there is a 50% chance of a bit flip in the MAC address.

PCIe on Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4

PCIe on Raspberry pi CM4 is now working. Testing has been limited to NVMe usage, and there is no guarantee that all PCIe devices will work.

To make sure PCIe comes up on the CM4, the EEPROM BOOT_ORDER must have NVME placed first, even if UEFI remains on SD CARD/eMMC. This will ensure correct PCIe initialization before running UEFI.

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