[syslinux] Status of gpxelinux?

[Sebastian Herbszt]

H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> On 04/25/2011 02:12 PM, Sebastian Herbszt wrote:
>> H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>>> On 04/25/2011 05:20 AM, Sebastian Herbszt wrote:
>>>> gpxelinux.0 from syslinux-4.04-8-gece69c7 doesn't seems to work on Bochs.
>>>> Seems to work slow on QEMU, but fine on VMware.
>>>> On Bochs it seems to freeze with
>>>> Trying to load: pxelinux.cfg/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000
>>>>
>>>> Sebastian
>>>
>>> Which Qemu NIC?
>> 
>> e1000.
> 
> e1000 was still a legacy driver until not all that long ago, quite
> possibly including whatever was included with the Qemu that you have (an
> Etherboot or gPXE stack.)

gPXE 0.9.9.

>>> Also, if you switch Bochs to pnic instead of ne2k, does it work?
>> 
>> Yes.
> 
> I suspect gpxelinux is running into the same UNDI interrupt/poll issue
> that the lwIP stack had, and which Michael confirmed had been fixed in
> iPXE relatively recently.  Unfortunately, right now iPXE doesn't work
> for me at all, so I can't verify that.

You seem to be correct. I applied the following changes from iPXE to the
gPXE tree inside syslinux and it works now on Bochs with ne2k too:

[undi] Support underlying UNDI devices that don't support interrupts
[undi] Cope with devices that erroneously claim not to use interrupts
[undi] Assume that interrupts are not supported if IRQ=0

Unfortunatelly this didn't speed things up in QEMU.
I also don't understand why i didn't hit this problem before while using
the gPXE rom without this changes to load plain pxelinux.0.

Sebastian