[syslinux] IPMI serial over lan disconnects seem to trigger extlinux reboots

[Andrew J. Schorr]

Hi,

Thanks for your help.

On Mon, Nov 11, 2013 at 08:00:47PM -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> There is no reason by Syslinux would reboot the system on a serial
> disconnect.  There could be a bug, of course; now, Syslinux 4.05 is
> pretty old so unless you can reproduce this on a current version that
> would be useful.

I am using 4.05 because that's what's packaged in the latest Fedora
release (Fedora 19 in my case).  I wonder why they are using such an
old version.  I will take a look at how difficult it would be to build
the latest version on Fedora.

> The other option is that there is something in the IPMI BC that causes
> the reboots which happens on Syslinux and not Grub for some reason.

That could well be the case.  I am just speculating about the cause.  I really
do not know what is going wrong.  There is some kind of bad interaction
occurring during the load of the initramfs.  If I disable the IPMI serial
console session, the system boots fine.  So it must be some strange interaction
between the IPMI BMC and Syslinux.  

> You may want to turn serial interrupts on (serial 0 57600 0x00b) and see
> if that makes any difference.

I tried that, but it did not help.  The system still tends to reboot while
loading the initramfs.

Thanks,
Andy