[syslinux] [PATCH 2/2] core: Fix stack overflow when reloading config

[H. Peter Anvin]

On January 26, 2016 5:46:25 PM PST, Celelibi <celelibi at gmail.com> wrote:
>2016-01-26 20:22 UTC+01:00, H. Peter Anvin <hpa at zytor.com>:
>> On 01/26/16 06:55, Celelibi wrote:
>>>
>>> Do you mean executables should also stay in memory and just get a
>>> fast-reinitialization when re-running them?
>>>
>>
>> Yes.  I hope that it would make things a lot faster, especially over
>the
>> network.  However, it wouldn't really matter in the common case of
>just
>> showing a menu and booting from there; now when we have hierarchical
>menus.
>>
>>> However, unless we do something more heavy-weight, when a config
>file
>>> is loaded, I guess all modules will have to be unloaded anyway since
>>> the search path can be changed by the new config file and other
>>> modules with the same name can be loaded.
>>
>> Hm.  We could rather easily deal with that by storing the full path
>of
>> the module; that way we can distinguish them.
>>
>
>That means modules will accumulate in memory. If we add a way to prune
>the least recently used modules when memory is required, that become
>quite close to the file system cache I had in mind with the solution
>3. ^^ Except it's specialized for modules.
>
>
>>> BTW, can ldlinux.c32 be affected by the PATH directive or another
>>> configuration option?
>>
>> Not at the moment, and I don't think it should be.  ldlinux.c32 is
>very
>> closely coupled with the bootstrap part of the bootloader itself.
>
>Thanks, that's what I thought.
>
>
>Celelibi

Yes, we could expire them, and that probably would make sense once we cross a certain memory threshold.  The big question is if that would ever actually happen.
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