[syslinux] HLT when idle

Shachar Shemesh syslinux at shemesh.biz
Sun Jun 19 02:50:33 PDT 2005


Hi all,

I am wondering about the following suggested change:
In isolinux.asm, line 50 (at least in my Debian patched version), add 
the line "hlt" inside the "DO_IDLE" macro.

Explanation:
When running isolinux on a vmware box, the boot menu takes up all 
available CPU. This change seems to solve this problem. I have read 
elsewhere that such a change will not go in, as the system is set up to 
perform polling. From looking at the keyboard code, I see no reason for 
this to be a problem. Instead of a busy loop we now have a loop that 
waits for an interrupt, and then polls. Testing the code confirms that 
this works. The only potential problem I can think of is if a key is 
pressed prior to the keyboard loop being entered. I am not familiar 
enough with the code to assess whether that is a problem.

I have not checked ldlinux, but it's highly likely that it will work 
there as well.

          Shachar

-- 
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Source Consulting ltd.
http://www.lingnu.com/




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