[syslinux] binaries in syslinux-4.02.tar.bz2

[Gene Cumm]

On Fri, Sep 24, 2010 at 07:11, Alex Zeffertt
<alex.zeffertt at eu.citrix.com> wrote:
> In doc/distrib.txt H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>
>> For creators of Linux distributions:
>>
>> Syslinux is a notoriously hard program to debug, since it runs outside
>> of any operating system, and has a tendency to expose BIOS and
>> hardware bugs on various systems.  Therefore, I would appreciate if
>> you would resist the temptation of recompiling the Syslinux bootloader
>> itself (ldlinux.asm) if at all possible.  If you do that, I will have
>> to refer any bug reports I receive back to the respective distributor.
>
> Rather than recommending to packagers not to rebuild the binaries, shouldn't
> we work out the cause of their problems when they do?  For example there may
> be a binary in the tarball which does not have precursors.  (That is one
> explanation of the error message I saw that I can't find in the source
> code.)

I can tell you from experience that finding a bug in some of this code
(especially any assembly code with extra emphasis on the MBRs and
diskstart) without a BIOS bug can be pretty challenging.

Based on a quick Google search on your string "ERR: Not a Multiboot
bootloader!", yielding
http://lists.xensource.com/archives/html/xen-changelog/2006-09/msg00144.html
I think the error actually came from your xen.gz.  I'd guess that it
thinks it was not set up properly to boot in the first place.  If this
is the case, there's a bug somewhere (Syslinux, possibly just the
variant you used, mboot.c32, or your xen.gz) that should be addressed
separately.

> We need to avoid getting into the situation in which only one machine is
> capable of rebuilding the package.

I'm pretty sure we don't have that situation.

> The environment in which I built the binaries that didn't generate a prompt
> was a fresh CentOS 5.5 i386 chroot with nasm-2.09.01-1.  Is it possible to
> describe in a similar manner the environment in which the working binaries
> in the tarball were built?

I can't speak for the official binaries (I think Fedora 13 but
uncertain) but I can say what I use and get working binaries.

Ubuntu 10.04 amd64 with the addition of gcc-mingw32
4.4.2-6ubuntu0~lucid~palippa5 for syslinux64.exe
Contained at this time:
gcc version 4.4.3 (Ubuntu 4.4.3-4ubuntu5)
GNU ld (GNU Binutils for Ubuntu) 2.20.1-system.20100303
NASM version 2.07 compiled on Nov  5 2009
GNU Make 3.81

There may be others I'm missing but that should cover most of it.

-- 
-Gene