[syslinux] Problem with buggy Dell Latitude BIOS

Gene Cumm gene.cumm at gmail.com
Thu Jun 14 14:31:07 PDT 2012


On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 6:07 AM,  <heiko.helmle at horiba.com> wrote:
> Hello List,
>
> the most recent BIOS (A13) for the Dell Latitude E6520 has problems -
> gpxelinux (4.05) cannot load larger initrd (or memdisk images) with this
> BIOS and fails with "Not enough memory to load specified image". This
> results in a few of our boot images (most importantly the Backup Rescue
> image (and parted magix pxe version)) failing.
>
> A12 BIOS works okay. So at the moment we stay at A12.
>
> 1) Can this problem be worked around somehow? I have created sysdumps
> (with sysdump.c32) of both BIOS states but can't read/understand the
> output.

It's pretty easy: http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php/Linux.c32

> 2) Is it worth the trouble of reporting this to Dell? If yes, do they have
> a contact for this kind of bugs? I doubt regular Dell support is able to
> handle these kinds of problem.

Possibly but I'd lean towards no.  It's what's sometimes referred to
as a "memory hole", a range of memory allocated for other uses before
SYSLINUX can use it.

-- 
-Gene



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