Lately I've been messing around with an x86 Virtual Machine running on a VMWare ESXI host.
It all runs fine. I have quite a lot experience in running OpenWRT on KVM and Virtualbox. But this time I faced some things that are rather unclear to me.
What makes the sort order of the ethernetports (eth0, eth1, eth2 etc..) when I add them to the VM? And especially when I add some more, later on?
I noticed that this order is different from the order that I see in ESXI's GUI and that I find in is .vmx config file.
Maybe at initial installation it does keep that order but after adding and removing some virtual NICs I do not recognise any logic.
Is there a way to manipulate or rescan the ports?
Few ideas - Is the order being sorted based on the MAC address?
I haven’t tried but does udev exist for x86 images ? If so, would need to add rules.
What order does the kernel see the devices with ? lspci -vv
You can "manipulate" the ports in the config or with a [virtual]cable.
The port ordering is defined by the underlying virtual hardware. In the old days you'd change the network card slot. See the virtualisation man pages re: similar feature sets.
Without ethool blink... just enable the vnics one at a time to identify.
Yes, searching deeply using lspci (had to install the package pciutils) made it more clear to me.
I have to invest it further but for now it seems to me that vmware firstly puts the virtual pci ethernetinterfaces in a logical order. Eth0, 1 and 2 on the physical (simulated) pci address 160, 224 and 256. And increment the mac-addresses 10 each respectively.
But when adding 2 more NICs it just puts them somewhere on a free Phy address (161 and 193 in the case I just tested). The previous NICs kept their mac-addresses. I think OpenWRT takes the (new) pci-slot order while I see a different order in vmware's GUI.
The .vmx file is well hackable. I'm gonna try to swap some of these PCI Phy-address now.
I have been trying to accomplish exactly this, getting OpenWRT to run on ESXI 6.5. (am on a HW not supporting 6.7 or 7).
I only get v15.02 to run though. Have not managed to get a newer built on it.
Could you point me to some kind of tutorial on how to manage to get a newer release on it? Have also tried an update through the GUI, no success. And tried to convert the image to VMDK with QEMU, also no success....