[syslinux] syslinux-2.11 boot, syslinux-3.20 fail

Gilles Espinasse g.esp at free.fr
Tue Jan 30 17:31:52 PST 2007


We used syslinux package on IPCop with success to install from floppy, from
cdrom, from usb key and pxe.

I upgrade the distribution nine month ago from 2.11 to more recent versions
(3.11, later 3.20).
We add one consistent report of a laptop machine that boot with 2.11 but
fail with 3.11 and 3.20

Symptom is that the machine don't display anything after loading the kernel
and initrd.
with 3.11 or 3.20, it gets as far
as:
  Boot:
  Loading vmlinuz.............
  Loading instroot.gz.........
then stops.


Machine is a Compaq armada 1500 series (P90 48MB RAM pcmcia NIC, no usb, no
cdrom)
RAM is error free: no errors after 5 hours of memtest86

the most interresting part of the thread is at
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=ipcop-user&m=117019822812411&w=2

syslinux.cfg mostly is
DEFAULT vmlinuz
APPEND ide=nodma initrd=instroot.gz root=/dev/ram0 rw

As a notice, I have two other different machines that are very slow to start
with syslinux (typically more than 5s between each . during kernel load and
initrd).
Both are with K6-2 cpu and a VIA chipset, one is a laptop, one is a desktop.
I don't know what to investigate with them

Gilles Espinasse





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