[syslinux] Syslinux/pxeboot.0 trouble

[H. Peter Anvin]

On 01/10/2011 12:23 PM, Arnaud Lacombe wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've been hacking this week-end on a Vortex86[0] based device (ebox
> 3300) and had quite a few trouble with pxelinux.0 on it. Actually, I
> narrowed the problem to the `pxenv' routine always returning 1. This
> lead to an infinite loop while trying to transfer the config file. I'm
> not sure what the problem is, but the FreeBSD PXE bootloader does work
> on the same hardware, with the same settings, so pxelinux.0 must be
> doing something wrong.

This doesn't follow; it just indicates that pxelinux.0 is doing
something *different*.  For example, if the entire UDP stack in the ebox
is unimplemented, FreeBSD might load just fine but pxelinux would fail
horribly.

> Has anyone ever had a similar problem ? if not, what should be the
> course of action to fix this issue ? I thought of comparing how the
> FreeBSD PXE bootloader and pxelinux.0 were working, but there may be
> other way.

There are a few ways: you can add debugging messages (fairly easy to do
in Syslinux 4, since it's just printf) to the PXE calls, or you could
try to use gpxelinux.0 first.  There are a lot of PXE stacks that are
very very broken, but are still good enough to load gPXE/iPXE to get a
working stack.  At that point you can try both the UNDI version (i.e.
gpxelinux.0) or a native version.

	-hpa