[syslinux] Re: Does pxelinux work with >1GB RAM?

[H. J. Lu]

On Mon, Oct 07, 2002 at 09:36:32AM -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> H. J. Lu wrote:
> > On Sun, Oct 06, 2002 at 08:30:45PM -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> > 
> >>H. J. Lu wrote:
> >>
> >>>On machines with 2GB RAM, pxelinux doesn't seem to work for me. With
> >>>Intel PXE, I had to limit the memory available to PXE to 768MB RAM.
> >>>Has anyone tried pxelinux on machines with >= 1GB RAM? How do I
> >>>limit memory to 768MB for pxelinux?
> >>>
> >>
> >>It had been run, successfully, on machines with as much as 6 GB of RAM.
> >>
> > 
> > 
> > The problem has something to do with MB/BIOS. I have an Intel Server
> > Board SE7500WV2 with 2GB RAM. If I disable the on-board Promise ATA
> > RAID in BIOS, pxelinux works fine. If I enable the Promise, pxelinux
> > won't work. It will download linux.0 and configure file. The machine
> > will hang after pxelinux downloads the first file specified in
> > configure file, which is
> > 
> > display pxelinux.cfg/pxe.msg
> > 
> 
> The Promise ATA RAID BIOS is one of the buggiest pieces of sh*t I've 
> ever seen.  It doesn't surprise me it's screwing things up, although it 
> is certainly very odd.
> 
> Sorry, I don't have access to this hardware; all I can say is "avoid, 
> avoid, avoid, avoid."  I keep getting bug reports about different things 
> breaking on it.

I don't have much a choice on that one. FWIW, it works with Intel PXE
if I limit the memory to 768MB RAM in Intel PXE.

I noticed that pxelinux goes wrong after the configure file is
downloaded. I think pxelinux may overwrite some memory used by
Promise BIOS.


H.J.