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 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
- Based on ESXi 8.0U3c
- Include USB NIC fling
- Update virtual UEFI version
- Fix TPM2 unaligned access
- Add unsupported vmx config option for 16 KB and 64 KB granule:
- cpu.ID_AA64MMFR0_EL1.TGran16 = TRUE
- cpu.ID_AA64MMFR0_EL1.TGran64 = TRUE
- Fix GICv2 v2m support with device tree
- Fix big endian guest support regression
- Fix ntg3 driver support (experimental)
- Probe SDEI Event 0 support – stop disabling SDEI for Ampere Altra.
- Add Arm "Generic Diagnostic Dump and Reset Device Interface" ACPI AGDI table support
Update your ESXi from the offline depot:
esxcli software profile update -d /vmfs/volumes/datastore1/VMware-ESXi-8.0U3c-24449057-depot.zip -p ESXi-8.0U3c-24449057-standard
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: esxionarm.pdl@broadcom.com
Support for 16 KB and 64 KB translation table granule size
The Arm architecture does support 3 different "base page size": 4 KB, 16 KB and 64 KB. Because of incompatibilities with some of the virtual devices, the 16 KB and 64 KB support were removed from ESXi Arm VMs.
This unfortunately broke RHEL 8 (and other derivative distribution like CentOS 8, Rocky 8, ...) VMs. This fling update includes 2 options to allow those larger granules to be used again. Open up the vmx config file, and add the following lines:
cpu.ID_AA64MMFR0_EL1.TGran16 = TRUE
cpu.ID_AA64MMFR0_EL1.TGran64 = TRUE
Those options are not supported. You can update to the 9.x branches that comes with 4 KB support by default.
Arm Generic Diagnostic Dump and Reset Device Interface
DEN0093 introduces a new interface to implement a non-maskable diagnostic dump feature on Arm, using either a SDEI event or a native interrupt.
This update includes the AGDI support, but we haven't been able to test the functionality in practice. If your hardware supports it, be sure to let us know!
TPM2 support
ESXi Arm Fling supports TPM2, but only using the TIS/FIFO interface. If your firmware is not using that interface, you will get a warning: