[syslinux] PXELINUX keeppxe mem footprint

Moore, Patrick J patrick.moore at imperial.ac.uk
Fri Jun 20 13:42:43 PDT 2003


Hi,
 
I want to use PXELINUX to load a DOS disk image which I currently use for
Win2K/XP unattended installs. I want to move away from reliance on specific
NDIS2 drivers and use the 3Com UNDIS3C driver instead. I have used this
successfully to start the MSClient, but the problem is that the UNDI and PXE
layer take about 90K of base memory, which means that WINNT.EXE has
insufficent memory to run after networking is started.
 
I have already performed all the base memory saving tricks I can (including
reclaiming 32K from the VGA BIOS area, loading DOS high, using loadhigh for
most things) but still this is not enough.
 
My question is - do I really need both the UNDI layer and PXE stack to stay
resident for this UNDIS3C to function or could I get away with just keeping
the UNDI layer? Currently PXELINUX only allows both to stay resident. Is
there a way to reduce this memory overhead?
 
Thanks,
 
Patrick

(apologies for the earlier post in HTML)



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