[syslinux] extlinux 6.03 serial console not responding to input

[Ady]

> Hi,
> 
> On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 05:13:25PM -0400, Dany St-Amant wrote:
> > Replying to the original e-mail as the thread was containing little extra useful information (beside the fact that the issue was similar as to when the flow control values were not provided at all).
> > 
> > Based a quick look at the code I had on hand 2.06 and 6.01. I would suggest that you use a decimal number instead of an hexadecimal one for the flow control.
> > 
> > The assembly parseint() of 2.06 supported decimal,octal,hexadecimal and some val+K, val+M. The new C parsing code uses plain atoi() which appears to be quite limited.
> > 
> > So both your 0x003 and 0x00b are handled as 0, causing you to go back to before you introduced these values.
> 
> Yes!  That's it -- the fix was as simple as replacing "0x003" with "3".
> I guess the code should use strtol or sscanf instead of atoi.  Or the docs need
> to be fixed.
> 
> Thank you!
> 
> Regards,
> Andy
 
Excellent! After all, testing with alternative notations and with 
different values indeed (would have) triggered a different behavior :).

This is not the first time we see something not working with the SERIAL 
directive since v.5.xx. For instance, see:

 _Start of the email thread ("syslinux 5.01 serial regression"):
 http://www.syslinux.org/archives/2013-May/020019.html 
 _GeneC:
 http://www.syslinux.org/archives/2013-May/020023.html 

Note the similarities to the current case.

This was the email thread that triggered the prior (latest) changes in 
the source code I mentioned before.

Please note that one month later, during June 2013, there was an 
additional report about the TIMEOUT not working correctly when also 
using the SERIAL directive. It might be worth re-testing such case.


Now, instead of expecting users to only use decimal values, could 
someone with the adequate knowledge *please* consider sending a patch 
(to this Syslinux mailing list), so older configurations would work as 
expected?

TIA,
Ady.
 
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