[syslinux] extlinux 6.03 serial console not responding to input

[Andrew J. Schorr]

Hi Ady,

On Sun, May 17, 2015 at 09:11:25PM +0300, Ady via Syslinux wrote:
> Are you sure the issue is related to the serial directive / console?

Just to be clear, the boot menu displays properly on the IPMI SOL serial
console, and the system boots up fine.  It's just that it doesn't
respond to any user input.  As a result, I cannot boot anything other
than the default selection.

> Have you tested the boot menu in a non-serial setup, so to discard 
> other issues (e.g. that Syslinux 6.03 can actually boot this particular 
> kernel with this particular options, or that the menu is actually 
> working)?

As I mentioned above, the system boots fine, and the menu is displayed
as expected.

> Have you tested the serial directive / console without using the UI 
> directive nor a menu?
> 
> For the latter, I mean something like:
> 
> SERIAL 0 57600 0x003
> DEFAULT Linux1
> TIMEOUT 100
> LABEL Linux1
> LINUX mykernel1
> APPEND myoptions1
> LABEL Linux2
> LINUX mykernel2
> APPEND myoptions2

I tried this.  I also added "prompt 1", and it printed a "boot:"
prompt, but it doesn't seem to respond to anything that I type.

To reiterate, this exact same configuration was working perfectly
using extlinux 4.05.

> Have you tried using also the CONSOLE and/or NOHALT directives?

I just patched my extlinux.conf like so:

bash$ head extlinux.conf
serial 0 115200 0x003
ui menu.c32
menu title Telemetry ExtLinux Boot Menu
timeout 100
NOHALT 1
CONSOLE 0

label Linux1
    menu label Fedora21-x86_64 3.19.7-200.fc21
    kernel /vmlinuz-3.19.7-200.fc21.x86_64

It still does not respond to keyboard input.

> Have you tried using official upstream pre-built binaries from 
> kernel.org?

I have not.  Is it conceivable that Fedora is shipping a botched copy?
The Fedora source RPM includes a single patch:
   0001-Add-install-all-target-to-top-side-of-HAVE_FIRMWARE.patch
This adds some targets to the Makefile.

> Feedback is appreciated.

Likewise.  It would be great to get this fixed, as I vastly prefer
extlinux to grub2.

Thanks,
Andy