@Jeremy Good — the file being there confirms the /tftpboot fix landed. Two separate things in your report, and one of them was mine again.
“Downloads pxelinux, but then stops” — partly expected, partly another FOG bug, now fixed.
If there was no task queued for the Pi at that moment, the file FOG writes says localboot 0, which tells U-Boot “nothing to do, carry on to local disk”. That’s by design: no task, no imaging. So “stops” after a successful pxe get is correct behavior unless you’d queued a capture first.
If there was a task queued, it would still have stopped, and that one is on me: the file named the kernel and init as http://… URLs, which is what boards with wget use. Your U-Boot’s pxe code can’t follow a URL — I checked U-Boot’s source (boot/pxe_utils.c😞 every kernel and initrd line is fetched over TFTP, relative to wherever the config came from, so kernel http://… became a TFTP request for a file literally called that. Fixed in working-1.6 (PR #1679): the file now says kernel arm_Image / initrd arm_init.cpio.gz, and FOG copies those two files into /tftpboot itself the first time a task is queued for an ARM host, and again whenever the kernel is updated. Run the updater once more, queue a capture for the Pi, then on the server check that /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/01-88-a2-9e-53-34-c0 contains kernel arm_Image and that /tftpboot/arm_Image and /tftpboot/arm_init.cpio.gz exist.
The intermittent DHCP is a network-timing problem, not a FOG one, and Tom’s STP question is the right first suspect. On a switch port running classic spanning tree, the port doesn’t forward traffic for roughly 30 seconds after link-up (listening, then learning). U-Boot brings the link up and sends its DHCP discover immediately, retries for a few seconds, and gives up — that’s the “8 seconds searching”. The times it works are the times the port happened to already be forwarding. The Pi’s EEPROM boot succeeds because it retries for much longer. Two fixes, and I’d do both:
On the switch: enable PortFast / edge-port (or RSTP) on the ports the Pis plug into. That’s the real fix and it helps every PXE client, not just the Pis.
In U-Boot, so a slow port doesn’t kill the boot anyway:
setenv autoload no
setenv netretry yes
setenv bootcmd 'dhcp; pxe get; pxe boot'
saveenv
autoload no stops dhcp from also trying to TFTP a bootfile it was never given (that’s an extra timeout and a spurious failure in your sequence). netretry yes makes U-Boot keep retrying DHCP instead of giving up after a few seconds — the right call for a headless board that has nothing else to do, but be aware it means a Pi with no DHCP server on the wire will sit there retrying rather than dropping to the prompt.
If DHCP still fails after that, the next read is OPNsense’s DHCP log for that MAC: whether the discover even arrives, and what it offers. And as before, pasted text beats a screenshot — the exact lines around pxe boot are the ones I need next.
