[syslinux] pxelinux 5.x, 6.x memtest problem
H. Peter Anvin
hpa at zytor.com
Fri Jun 28 13:45:13 PDT 2013
On 06/28/2013 04:25 AM, Ady wrote:
>
> @Wim and @All,
> FWIW, in 2013-February there still were other additional issues with
> some kernels, including memory testers, so having a problem to boot
> memtest(86|86+|other) might or might not be related to the
> "PXE-stack-smasher" bug.
>
> For example, in v.4.06, the cfg entry could be:
> LINUX memtest
>
> and it would work OK, but if the entry was:
> COM32 linux.c32
> APPEND memtest
>
> it could / would fail, even using SYSLINUX (or PXELINUX). This
> behavior with linux.c32 seemed to indicate that there were already
> potential problems ahead in Syslinux 5.xx with certain kernels.
>
> Also, as a remainder, memtest is for BIOS only (AFAIK, at least
> current versions).
>
> So, if someone was having problems with memtest before, I would
> suggest trying again with the latest Syslinux build(s), booting with
> SYSLINUX and with PXELINUX. Comparing the results might help clarify
> whether the problem is actually related to the "PXE-stack-smasher"
> bug, or to something else (which might have been already solved in
> the last few months / days / hours).
>
This problem is understood, it just isn't entirely trivial to fix. The
problem is that memtest is an "ancient" kernel which has to be loaded at
a fixed address, but the PXE stack also wants to use the same address.
This causes issues if one also wants sane error behavior.
Incidentally, a member of my team at Intel did a patch to update this
bit of memtest; I'm should check to see if it went upstream yet.
-hpa
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