[syslinux] RH8.0 kernel lockup with PXELinux on x440

[Aaron Burt]

Howdy.  We've got a couple IBM x440 (Summit) 8-way Xeon systems that I've
been trying to get netbooting for a while.

Since we use Kickstart and SystemImager to load OSes on our systems, a
system has to be able to netboot before it can be made available to folks
for project use.

System BIOS is the current one, v1.08.  They're booting from a planar
BroadCom Tigon3 adapter.  BIOS message sez:
     UNDI PXE-2.1 (build 082) v3.1.15
Several other systems use the Tigon3 planar adapters just fine.

I've been able to load Red Hat Linux 8.0 from CD on both systems.  But
when I try to netboot a Red Hat 8.0 kickstart kernel, the system
hard-locks.  I've just verified that the boot kernel on the CD is
identical to the kernel I'm PXEbooting.  A RH 7.3 kickstart kernel loads
OK, though, as does my SystemImager kernel built from stock 2.4.20.

PXELinux.cfg (/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/AC140518) for the netboot looks like:
SERIAL 0 38400
TIMEOUT 50
LABEL linux
  KERNEL vmlinux-redhat-8.0
  APPEND ksdevice=eth0 ks=nfs:build:/tftpboot/ks-80-scsi.cfg load_ramdisk=1 initrd=initrd-redhat-8.0 ip=dhcp
#  APPEND console=ttyS0,38400n8 ksdevice=eth0 ks=nfs:build:/tftpboot/ks-80-scsi.cfg load_ramdisk=1
initrd=initrd-redhat-8.0 ip=dhcp
  DISPLAY message.txt
  PROMPT 0

Serial output looks like:
PXELINUX 2.04 2003-04-16  Copyright (C) 1994-2003 H. Peter Anvin
.


VGA output (hand-copied) looks like:
PXELINUX 2.04 2003-04-16  Copyright (C) 1994-2003 H. Peter Anvin
UNDI data segment at:   00094B80
UNDI data segment size: 3DE0
UNDI code segment at:   00098960
UNDI code segment size: 5020
PXE entry point found (we hope) at 9896:00D6
My IP address seems to be AC140518 172.20.5.24
ip=172.20.5.24:172.20.1.2:172.20.0.1:255.255.0.0
TFTP prefix:
Trying to load: pxelinux.cfg/AC140518
.
&f;G2w[male-symbol]&f.

What's interesting is that the last bit of linenoise is the same each time
I boot the RH 8.0 kickstart kernel.  It doen't exist in the kernel image,
but does in pxelinux.0.


Hoping there's a fix,
  Aaron Burt
  Open Source Development Lab