[syslinux] Re: Stumped

H. Peter Anvin hpa at zytor.com
Mon Nov 10 11:21:40 PST 2003


Peter Caldes wrote:
> 
> I too have this problem (2.0.6) where you get the 'boot:' prompt, you type
> the label of the kernel you want to use and when you hit 'ENTER' nothing
> happens.
> 
> If you don't type an option/label and hit ENTER, it boots the default
> image.
> However I have found if that you do NOT hit enter relatively quickly after
> you see the boot: prompt, then nothing happens and you can't even get the
> default image to boot.
> 
> My hardware is a blade server which has NO video card. Just a serial port.
> The BIOS on my server does console redirection to the serial port and stops
> the console redirection as soon as the OS starts running. I have noticed
> that console redirection is still active while pxelinux.0 is running while
> it displays the boot: prompt. You can tell redirection is active because it
> constantly refreshes the ENTIRE screen which is verry slow at 9600 :-(
> 
> I had a 'SERIAL' option defined in my PXELINUX config file and at first I
> thought PXELINUX was getting confused because it was trying to access both
> the serial port AND the console but the console was really being mapped by
> the BIOS to the serial port. However I still had the problem when I
> commented out the SERIAL option.
> 
> I haven't had time to try any other version of PXELINUX to see if something
> else works.
> 
> To the developers: Please let me know what I can provide you to help debug
> this.
> 

This sounds like it's getting some kind of input from the serial port
and it's getting confused.

Please *remove* (not comment out - just in case the parser's broken) the
SERIAL option and see what happens.

There really seems to be a lot of weirdness going on on machines with no
video card.  Some of that weirdness is possible to work around, but not
all of it.

	-hpa




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