UEFI PXE boot issue on ARM64

Hello all,

I'm trying to PXE boot the photon os 3 installer in a vsphere VM running on rpi 4 but the boot fails in the initrd image. I CAN install it on the same HW platform by adding a cdrom to the vm and mounting the datastore iso file. So the HW configuration is capable of running photon but NOT PXE boot the installer.

I'm using the base files in photon-3.0-26156e2d-aarch64.iso which were uploaded to a generic Nexus 3 http server.

I can successfully install Photon OS by PXE booting on an X86 vsphere VM using the same infrastructure, i'm using the photon-3.0-a383732.iso base files in the same Nexus 3 server. Obviously the RPM repo files have been copied to two different locations on Nexus based on their HW platform.

E.G.:

x86 is in /x86/iso/photon3
aarch64 is in /aa64/iso/photon3

The PXE boot server is using grub2 to load the kernel and initrd image with the following entry:

menuentry 'Install Photon OS 3' {
                  linux /kernels/arm/photon3/vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 loglevel=3 repo=http://192.168.0.98:10081/repository/homelab/aa64/iso/photon3/RPMS
                  initrd /kernels/arm/photon3/initrd.img
}

The problem seems to be that the installer fails to configure ip. Everything is DHCP based, like I've said, the x86 boot works ok.

The aarch64 VM fails to start the systemd-networkd service with error

Failed to connect stdout to the journal socket, ignoring: Permission denied
systemd-networkd.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=203/EXEC

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Start with the grub2 menuentry, the ARM64 vmlinuz and initrd.img paths, and the systemd-networkd failure shown in the report. Compare the ARM64 and x86 PXE boot inputs and installer behavior, then determine why the ARM64 initrd cannot configure DHCP. Done means ARM64 Photon OS 3 installation succeeds through PXE using the stated repository layout.