[syslinux] Problem with Syslinux 2.07 and APM on SMP system

[Josef Siemes]

Hi,

Terry Barnaby <terry at beam.ltd.uk> schrieb am 07.01.04 15:12:09:
> The system boots fine using the standard Grub boot loader which loads
> exactly the same kernel and initial RAM disk and APM works fine when
> booted using Grub.

Hmm. Grub does many things to the system (and I think it does way too much for the
purpose it's needed for ...), and I AFAIK it also fiddles around with APM. 
Maybe it 'fixes' your bios to behave more sane to the kernel.

Did you try lilo? It's similar to syslinux that it doesn't do too much to the
system, and definitely doesn't touch APM either.

> So there must be some difference between the way syslinux (pxe and iso)
> boots Linux and Grub boots Linux that causes the failier.
> 
> The code in the Linux kernal that prints the error message is attempting
> to make sure the kernel is running on processor 0 as there are problems
> with some BIOSes when other CPU's attempt to access the APM BIOS functions.
> Could syslinux (pxe and iso) be booting using CPU 1 rather than CPU 0 ?

Not that I know. AFAIK the BIOS (and that's what syslinux uses) runs on CPU 0,
so there should be no problem with that.

Since it seems to be a bios issue you could try to upgrade the bios to the latest 
version, if you didn't do that already. Since vitrually all installation CD's use syslinux
(isolinux or syslinux itself) this should have happened to more people.

hpa, any comments?

Regards,

Josef

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