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

[Terry Barnaby]

Hi Joseph,

By the way I suspect that not many people have noticed the problem
as:

1. It only occurs on SNMP systems.
2. It only occurs with an SNMP kernel, normal installation kernels are
	single processor.
3. It only occurs when the boot option apm=power-off is used.

So is suspect that very few have noticed this ....

Terry

Terry Barnaby wrote:
> Hi Josef,
> 
> I have tried using lilo on the system and all is fine.
> So the system boots fine with Grub and Lilo, but if I use
> syslinux's pxeboot or isolinux the kernel displays the APM
> error and will not power off correctly.
> 
> So there appears to be something that syslinux does or does not
> do compared with grub and lilo ....
> 
> Terry
> 
> Josef Siemes wrote:
> 
>> 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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> 

-- 
Dr Terry Barnaby                     BEAM Ltd
Phone: +44 1454 324512               Northavon Business Center, Dean Rd
Fax:   +44 1454 313172               Yate, Bristol, BS37 5NH, UK
Email: terry at beam.ltd.uk             Web: www.beam.ltd.uk
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