[syslinux] vesamenu partly broken in 3.70?

[H. Peter Anvin]

lurker wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> As of syslinux-3.70, vesamenu.c32 seems to be broken. But here's the
> kicker: it's only broken when booting from USB, not from CD!
> 
> What happens is that the colours are not set like I've set in the cfg
> and only one entry shows up. On my laptop that entry contains some
> really messed up symbols but on my stationary computer it's just empty,
> so it seems we're dealing with some memory issues here. On both systems
> pressing ENTER shows a password prompt although I have configured no
> such thing. Pressing ESC brings me to the usual boot prompt which works
> just fine.
> 
> But as I said, when I boot from CD on the same systems with the same
> homebrew Linux distro and syslinux/isolinux cfg the vesa menu works.
> 
> Simply swapping out vesamenu.c32 with one from 3.63 or earlier versions
> fixes the issue on USB, and that's the reason why I think that's the
> culprit. Or could it be something with my procedure of installing and
> configuring syslinux on USB? What I do is basically the following which
> I think is standard:
> 
> First I copy over the relevant content from the CD image to the bootable
> USB partition, then I do:
> 
> dd if=/usr/lib/syslinux/mbr.bin of=${USB_DEVICE}
> syslinux ${USB_PARTITION}
> 
> I'm not sure what other info or specs I should post in order to help
> troubleshooting this, so please tell me. The problem feels quite strange
> as I didn't expect the vesa menu to behave all different when run from
> USB compared to CD, but what do I know.
> 

You're right, and there is likely to be an unrelated problem.  Since you 
didn't give any specific details about your systems it's hard to know.

It would help if you could try 3.71-pre15, and if that doesn't work, try 
to narrow it down to a specific prerelease between 3.63 and 3.70 which 
breaks your machines.

	-hpa