ESXi 8 - ignoring a TSC mismatch PSOD

Problem

Both of my Dell T5810s fail to boot ESXi 8.0U2 - they quickly meet a PSOD that calls out a TSC sync error.

The CPUs in these machines are an E5-2660 v4 and E5-2690 v4 (both the 14-core Broadwell die, incidentally.)

The TSC is off by same value every boot, and both machines experience no instability with Win/Linux (or ESXi after the counter error is bypassed.) YMMV with bypassing this yourself.

Fix

Hit the Shift + O keys to edit your boot parameters while you’re booting the installer, and (later on) your new installation for the first time.

Add the following arguments:

tscSyncSkip=TRUE timerForceTSC=TRUE

After first boot, SSH to the machine and set this parameter permanently with:

  1. use esxcli:
esxcli system settings kernel set --setting=tscSyncSkip --value=TRUE

esxcli system settings kernel set --setting=timerForceTSC --value=TRUE
  1. edit /bootbank/boot.cfg (kernelopt line)
kernelopt=... tscSyncSkip=TRUE timerForceTSC=TRUE

Source

VMware community discussion (Archive.org link)