[syslinux] pxelinux fails to load miniroot completly

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

--On Thursday, March 27, 2008 03:46:44 PM -0400 Jeffrey Hutzelman 
<jhutz at cmu.edu> wrote:

> --On Thursday, March 27, 2008 10:12:24 AM -0700 "H. Peter Anvin"
> <hpa at zytor.com> wrote:
>
>> detlef oertel wrote:
>>>>
>>>> What's worse is this will limit syslinux to only 29 MB of high memory,
>>>> even on the best of days, despite the fact that there is a gigabyte of
>>>> memory in the machine.  This means that your large miniroot simply
>>>> doesn't fit.
>>>
>>> Hmm,
>>> why fits (and work) the miniroot.gz with isolinux before 2.09-pre15 ?
>>>
>>
>> Because the earlier BIOS would misparse your E820 information so that it
>> misses the reserved block.  This is *wrong*, but it just happens to work
>> on your machine, probably by pure luck.
>>
>> I notice your BIOS version is A01.  You may want to look for a newer
>> BIOS, especially since someone else said they had the same machine
>> without this problem.
>
> Nope; that's the "base board" version.  The BIOS claims to be 2.0.12,
> which is a legitimate version for these systems (in fact, it appears to
> be the current version).  In a moment, I'll upgrade my test machine to
> that version and see if that results in a similar memory map.

OK; I took a similar machine (but with more memory) and upgraded it to BIOS 
2.0.12, and now I see the strange E820 row as well.  Just as with the OP, 
it's entry 4, start 0x1e00000 size 0x80040 reserved.  Photo attached.

-- Jeff
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