[syslinux] SysLinux 5.0 - Problems booting via PXE

[Matt Fleming]

On Wed, 2013-01-09 at 15:20 +0100, Schlomo Schapiro wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have seen the same effect. We use now 4.05 with gpxelinux.0 for HTTP
> downloads and suffer a lot from the super slow download on VMware ESX VMs.
> 
> I tried 5.00:
> 
>    - I was disappointed to find that only gpxelinux.0 supports HTTP unlike
>    the pxelinux.0 from 4.10 which had HTTP built-in.
>    - The HTTP download was the same slow as with 4.05
>    - The kernel command line was not passed to the system which caused our
>    installations to fail (obvious if no install= parameter is given).

How many bytes was your kernel command line? If it was >= 256 bytes this
bug has now been fixed and will be available in the 5.01 release.

>    - The PATH setting did not work which is very inconvenient as I would
>    like to put all syslinux components (*.c32, *.0) into /bin so that I can
>    switch pxelinux+c32 files with a symlink.

What was the PATH string that you used in your config file? What error
message did you get when it didn't work?

>    - Loading vesamenu.c32 more than once did not work (I was doing this to
>    jump to other menus). As a "workaround" I restructured my menu system to
>    only do config xxx.txt which luckily also works with 4.05

Oh, that's interesting. This use case is currently explicitly forbidden
because of the way that the module loading code *used* to work. Because
ldlinux.c32 used to be listed as a dependency for those modules that
linked against its exported symbols, we had to forbid re-loading
executable modules (as opposed to library modules) otherwise everytime a
module, such as menu.c32, was loaded, it would reload ldlinux.c32 and
drop the user at a prompt!

Luckily, the module dependency code doesn't work this way anymore, and
we no longer need this restriction. I've got a fix for this in my patch
queue. It will be in 5.01.

-- 
Matt Fleming, Intel Open Source Technology Center