[syslinux] extlinux from syslinux 4.04 failed hard after choosing bzImage.

Tyler Durden tylerdu at bounced.me
Sat Nov 19 16:33:14 PST 2011


On 20.11.2011 01:17, Gene Cumm wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 19, 2011 at 18:03, Tyler Durden<tylerdu at bounced.me>  wrote:
>> On 19.11.2011 16:11, Piotr Karbowski wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Today I replaced grub(1) with syslinux on my laptop, after rebooting to
>>> syslinux and selecting kernel I got massive freeze along with colorful
>>> output to screen - http://i.imgur.com/lFjFc.jpg
>>>
>>> I think I tried everything, even doing esc and writing after boot:
>>> /bzImage-3.1.0, after enter I had the same freeze with the same screen
>>> artefacts.
>>>
>>
>> Last week I stumbled across the same bug. Couldn't boot kernel 3.1.0 with
>> exactly the same symptoms as you (screen full of weird characters).
>> Fortunately, there's a simple workaround I found here:
>> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=647603
>>
>> Just rename the kernel image to something that doesn't end with zero (e.g.
>> bzImage-3.1) and it will boot just fine.
>>
>> Somehow extlinux chokes on kernel image names with zero in the last place.
>> Strange...
>
> It's a feature for the file type "guessing" documented in
> syslinux.txt.  I should have seen that one.
>

You mean this part:


  Syslinux will look at the file extension.
  The following extensions are recognized (case insensitive):

    none or other Linux kernel image
    .0            PXE bootstrap program (NBP) [PXELINUX only]


It clearly says "PXELINUX only", but it "works" flawlessly with EXTLINUX 
here. ;)

And, it's wildly incompatible with the standard "make install" on the 
kernel tree, which will install the kernel as /boot/vmlinuz-3.1.0 that 
can't be booted unless renamed. Also there's no error message, just the 
funky screen after the boot. Took me at least 2 hours to fix that.
-- 
Tyler




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