[syslinux] Problems booting on Intel i9x5 motherboards.

[Murali Krishnan Ganapathy]

Pat Suwalski wrote:
> I have finally had the time to do proper debugging. I'll report my 
> findings below:
>
> Murali Krishnan Ganapathy wrote:
>> If the advanced menu system also results in the same problem, then 
>> you can rule out menu.c32 code as a culprit. Hopefully, this can help 
>> identify the problem.
>
> At this point I have tried all versions of menu.c32, right from 3.00 
> when it first appeared. They all suffer the same on the two systems I 
> have that exhibit this behaviour.
>
> As previously stated, just typing out the command in the ISOLINUX 
> command line works perfectly.
>
> Also, as per your suggestion, I added a line to simple.c with the same 
> kernel and arguments, and it booted without problem.
>
> The problem, thus, must be in the implementation booting functionality 
> in menu.c32.
>
> Are there any suggested steps from here?
>
Now I am just thinking out aloud. If anything I say doesn't seem to make 
sense, feel free to say so. At this point, I see two possibilities (may 
be more I dont see)

(1) menu.c32 is not calling the API with the right string (extra spaces 
etc...)
(2) Parts of menu.c32 (or its effects) is still in memory after it has 
finished executing.

If (1) is the case, it should fail on all machines (assuming the kernel 
is the same). To check (2) you can try running some other code from 
menu.c32 and see if that is affected as well.
* Start with something like "display.c32" (displays a file and quits) or 
"simple.c" and go on to memtest86 etc
* Run menu.c32, exiting the menu system and running the kernel from the 
command line.

I agree that all the suggestions seem weird, but I guess weird problems 
call for weird suggestions.
* Alternately you can start inserting print statements in the menu.c32 
code to try to find what is going on.
BTW, can VMWare/Bochs/... emulate i9x5 motherboards? Then we can try to 
see if it i9x5 is the problem or just that you got a bad batch of machines.

Sorry couldn't be more helpful.

- Murali