[syslinux] isolinux failing on serial console

[Marc Pascual]

Hi,

I have a problem with isolinux failing to boot a kernel whenever I navigate
and trigger the menu via serial console. My test machine is a DL585 G2,
with iLO2. Navigating and booting the kernels off of the video console
works 100% of the time. With the serial connection however, I _sometimes_
get a "menu.c32: not a COM32R image" error. Sometime it works fine. I
suspect the serial connection is sending extra characters. I tried running
wireshark from my local pc, enabled telnet on the iLO2 GUI, and did some
packet captures. However I don't have an idea of how it looks like when
there are no extra characters sent, so I'm kind of lost there.

I'm not sure if this is an isolinux problem (specifically, menu.c32) and I
don't think it is. But I'm going to ask anyway -- is there any way for
isolinux to ignore extra characters if it is being sent? perhaps via
isolinux.cfg?

here's my config:

default menu.c32
serial 0 115200
# comment out to enable video console
# console 0

menu color screen 0;0
menu color border 0;0
menu color title 0;0
menu color unsel 0;0
menu color hotkey 0;0
# menu color sel 37;40
menu color disabled 0;0
menu color scrollbar 0;0
menu color tabmsg 0;0
menu color cmdmark 0;0
menu color cmdline 0;0
menu color pwdborder 0;0
menu color pwdheader 0;0
menu color pwdentry 0;0
menu color timeout_msg 0;0
menu color timeout 0;0
menu color help 0;0

timeout 600

Menu title Redhat Enterprise Linux 5 DHCP-Free Kickstart

label linux
  menu label build labcsvr002
  kernel vmlinuz
  append initrd=initrd.img
ks=http://x.x.x.x/kickstart/ks/testmachine.ksksdevice=eth0 console=tty
console=ttyS0,115200  ramdisk_size=32758
nostorage ip=4

label rescue
  menu label Rescue installed system
  kernel vmlinuz
  append initrd=initrd.img
ks=http://x.x.x.x/kickstart/ks/testmachine.ksksdevice=eth0 console=tty
console=ttyS0,115200  ramdisk_size=32758
nostorage ip=4

# 0x80 works most of the time, except on certain BIOS versions
# if we have a real need for localboot then we might need to look into
chain.c32
#
http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php/SYSLINUX#LOCALBOOT_type_.5BISOLINUX.2C_PXELINUX.5D
# http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/syslinux/users/7127
label local
  menu label Boot from local drive
  localboot 0x80

label memtest86
  menu label Memory test
  kernel memtest
  append console=tty console=ttyS0,115200


cheers,
Marc