[syslinux] extlinux & symbolic links

[Ryan Wilson]

I'm having a problem with extlinux booting to a Linux kernel image and
initial ramdisk with a symbolic link.

My /boot looks like this:
extlinux.conf
extlinux.sys
initrd.img -> initrd.img-2.6.22.1
initrd.img-2.6.22.1
vmlinuz -> vmlinuz-2.6.22.1
vmlinuz-2.6.22.1

The relevant section of my extlinux.conf file is this:
label 1
kernel /boot/vmlinuz
append initrd=/boot/initrd.img

The error message i get is simply:
Boot failed: please change disks and press a key to continue.

If I change extlinux.conf to look at the kernel image directly (no
symbolic link), everything boots correctly:
label 1
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.22.1
append initrd=/boot/initrd.img-2.6.22.1

I first tried this with syslinux 3.36 (installed by my distro) and
then I compiled 3.51 from the source. Both appeared to have the same
behavior.

Could I be doing something wrong? I read the documentation about
symbolic link support and I think I created my symlinks correctly
(relative paths). Is there something else I should try?

Thanks,
Ryan