[syslinux] Very slow download with pxelinux > 4.07 on specific hardware

[Gene Cumm]

On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 7:15 PM, Gene Cumm <gene.cumm at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 6:52 PM, Schlomo Schapiro <schlomo at schapiro.org> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On 10 March 2014 18:13, Eric PEYREMORTE <eric.peyremorte at iut-valence.fr>wrote:
>>
>>> Ok i give up. I will stick with the old version version (4.07) which works
>>> well with dell 380 and 790.
>>>
>>> I tried to understand what happened between 4.07 and 5 but i don't have
>>> the skill to understand low level c.
>>>
>>> Seems that the memory management changed a lot, maybe the culprit. But as
>>> many other things changed this is not obvious...
>>>
>>
>> sad to say, we have exactly the same problem. With HTTP downloads it is
>> much worse, we could not find a stable and reliable version after 4.x.
>> Sadly nobody wanted to fix our syslinux problem, even as paid development.
>>
>> I very much hope that the syslinux project will overcome these obstacles.
>> It would be sad to see all the new development stay unused because if this.
>
> It's also a balance of time.  While working on 4.10-pre*/5.10-pre*, I
> found that some hardware misreports its behavior.  "Sure, Interrupts
> work" but they don't is but one that I worked around on specific
> hardware.
>
> --
> -Gene

Simple test (and boot failure is an option as long as the core's
messages are intact).  Could both of you try fetching
Syslinux-4.10-pre22 (zip versus tar is your choice), extract out
core/pxelinux.0 and boot with it then record the 4-digit value for
flags (in the "UNDI: baseio" line) and the first 3 octets (6 hex
digits including 0s) of the MAC address and take a reasonable screen
shot (I find a cell phone against a solid object to be pretty decent
when angled to reduce glare and distanced for proper focus) but don't
bother sending the picture yet.  It's possible that the workaround I
utilized can either be having a negative impact or needs to be
extended to more hardware.

Attached you'll find an image with the two pieces highlighted.

--
-Gene
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