[syslinux] isolinux problem since 3.74

H. Peter Anvin hpa at zytor.com
Sat Oct 17 14:09:51 PDT 2009


On 10/17/2009 03:24 AM, Stillwell, Bryan wrote:
>>
>> The Linux kernel should ignore them, as should Syslinux, but there is of
>> course always the possibility there is a bug.
>
> There does seem to be a bug in syslinux.  If the extended attributes are
> set to 0 (which is out of spec and I'm working on getting fixed), it
> causes a hang at this piece of code in memscan.c:
>
>      if (!(e820buf->extattr&  1))
>        continue;
>
> This causes an infinite loop since we never move on to the next entry in
> the memory map.  Changing it to this code appears to do what is expected
> for me:
>
>      if (!(e820buf->extattr&  1)) {
>        ireg.ebx.l = oreg.ebx.l;
>        continue;
>      }
>

The current versions of Syslinux don't even query extended attributes; 
it always uses size = 20 requests.  As I mentioned, we have found too 
many BIOSes which just report garbage in the feature flags.

	-hpa




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