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

H. Peter Anvin hpa at zytor.com
Tue Nov 12 13:41:29 PST 2013


On 11/12/2013 01:22 PM, Andrew J. Schorr wrote:
> 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.
> 

One possibility is that either the PXE stack or the BMC uses memory that
it shouldn't.  Try setting a mem= option with less memory than you
actually have and see if that changes things.

	-hpa




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