[syslinux] Strange behaviour when using vesamenu.c32 and PXELinux

H. Peter Anvin hpa at zytor.com
Fri May 8 10:12:44 PDT 2009


Marius Eikenes wrote:
> Hello, i have now been testing some more.
> 
> The ones I am having problems with as of now are ASUS Laptops, it is
> consistently happening on all of the laptops of the type: Asus M50v.
> The PXE Boot Rom says: Realtek 8111B/8111C Gigabit Ethernet Controller
> v2.08 (070827).
> Everything starts up nice, but what happens is as earlier described:
> The menu hangs when choosing an item. But everything works if escaping
> the menu and typing the label at the boot:-command line.
> So i am guessing the problem lies in vesamenu(?).
> This time i am running the latest testing-version of both pxelinux.0 and
> vesamenu.c32 (From the syslinux-3.81-pre2 package).
> I have also tried the ones from the syslinux-3.80 package, the same
> thing happens.
> 
> The menu works fine on the machines with the PXE Rom for: Realtek
> 8111B/8111C Gigabit Ethernet Controller v2.17 (080602)
> The Asus G71G laptops.
> It works with both syslinux-3.81-pre2 and syslinux-3.80 vesamenu.c32 and
> pxelinux.0.
> 
> So it looks like there might be something that's not working with v2.08
> of the Realtek 8111B/8111C PXE-rom?

Entirely possible.  In particular, if the PXE ROM (or PXELINUX, for that
matter) uses memory it's not allowed to use, it could greatly matter how
you got there for how the bug manifests itself.

As I'm sure you can well imagine, it's hard to replicate this kind of
stuff that is dependent on a specific version of specific hardware, and
it might even only happen with a specific mainboard BIOS.

One thing that would be helpful to know is if the same thing happens in
menu.c32 as opposed to vesamenu.c32.

	-hpa

-- 
H. Peter Anvin, Intel Open Source Technology Center
I work for Intel.  I don't speak on their behalf.




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