[syslinux] EFI: HP + syslinux = crash
Oscar Roozen
oscar.roozen at brightcomputing.com
Wed Aug 5 06:31:38 PDT 2015
On 05-08-15 04:17, Ady via Syslinux wrote:
>> Now... why is vesamenu.c32 crashing like it does now? Why is the version
>> I tried without Gene's latest patches crashing before even beginning to
>> load the first stage: ldlinux.e64?
> I think you were "hinted" about this before.
About what? Did I miss something obvious?
I now know why it did not load ldlinux.e64, but I still don't know why
it crashes. The code seems well written with error checking everywhere,
so I would expect an error message, or even a silent fail causing the
boot process to try the DVD player next, or whatever. Not a crash.
> Unfortunately, different
> people define "boot" in different ways.
In this case I define 'boot' as 'reach a stage where syslinux
successfully loads and runs a linux-kernel'. Up until now I think I
described reasonably well how far it got into this process.
> The not-so-good "news" is that, considering that vesamenu.c32 has
> several problems (under UEFI), the reasons for your latest crashes
> would need more specific (detailed) investigations and reports (as
> opposed to "failed to boot").
What more can I do? I dived deep into the C code of a product that I
don't have intimate knowledge of and spent more time on google than a
teenager on facebook, but this is all I can provide. Please help me out
here, as time is running out. I don't own the hardware and will probably
loose access to it soon.
Unfortunately the debugging process is barely documented at all. The
wiki page doesn't really help in this case and I had to read the source
to find out how to enable more verbose output. And then there is this
problem of stdout not being visible on this EFI system, so I first had
to debug the debugging system... ;(
Just describing my experience here. I'm new to the syslinux source and
am having a hard time trying to understand how everything sings along.
> Things that come to mind: the space-like character issues (whether
> SYSAPPEND is being used or not),
Nope.
>additional building interactions (gcc,> gnu-efi...)
I build using 'make spotless; make efi64', initially without any changes
to the code or makefiles. The build system is Centos 7.1.1503 at the
moment, with gcc version 4.8.3 20140911 (Red Hat 4.8.3-9). However,
binaries built by Gene crashed in the same way.
>, the output console (length of the command, keyboard
> issues...), screen resolution supported by your / the UEFI firmware,
> and more.
This all only got relevant yesterday, when I found out that replacing
vesamenu.c32 with menu.c32 solved the crashes in this case. Are there
any specific outputs you want to see? Just telling me you need more
doesn't really help... I don't want to spam the list with everything and
more I can capture, but if I leave out too much, by all means, please
ask for it.
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