Andreas Kotes
2007-Mar-01 17:47 UTC
[syslinux] memdisk from 3.36 crashing on Dell PowerEdge 1955
Hello list, I had to boot a Dell Diagnostic Disk today, and tried doing this via memdisk - which was when I noticed memdisk isn't working for me at all, neither from pxelinux nor syslinux. After trying around with 'raw', 'bigraw' and the like I noticed it doesn't even do anything when just using: LABEL diag KERNEL memdisk .. when I try that: boot: diag nothing more happens. I tried enabling debug tracers but didn't get any more information ... How do I debug this? How can I help fixing this? Kind regards, Andreas -- "God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -- H.L.Mencken
Andreas Kotes
2007-Mar-12 16:12 UTC
[syslinux] memdisk from 3.36 crashing on Dell PowerEdge 1955
Hello, same results with 3.40-pre12 - any advice at all? Andreas * Andreas Kotes <count-linux at flatline.de> [20070301 19:00]:> I had to boot a Dell Diagnostic Disk today, and tried doing this via > memdisk - which was when I noticed memdisk isn't working for me at all, > neither from pxelinux nor syslinux. > > After trying around with 'raw', 'bigraw' and the like I noticed it > doesn't even do anything when just using: > > LABEL diag > KERNEL memdisk > > .. when I try that: > > boot: diag > > nothing more happens. I tried enabling debug tracers but didn't get any > more information ...-- "God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -- H.L.Mencken
Ryan McLean
2007-Mar-12 16:25 UTC
[syslinux] memdisk from 3.36 crashing on Dell PowerEdge 1955
Have you tried with earlier versions to see which is the last major / pre version to work? If you do this is increases the chances that the problem can be fixed once it is known where the error was introduced. Regards, Ryan McLean
H. Peter Anvin
2007-Mar-12 21:18 UTC
[syslinux] memdisk from 3.36 crashing on Dell PowerEdge 1955
[Moving this thread back on-list, let's please keep it there.] Andreas Kotes wrote:> Hello hpa, > > * Andreas Kotes <count-linux at flatline.de> [20070312 18:33]: >> * H. Peter Anvin <hpa at zytor.com> [20070312 17:32]: >>>> same results with 3.40-pre12 - any advice at all? >>> What's your full config space entry? The below doesn't specify any disk >>> image at all. >> # Diagnostic software >> LABEL diag >> KERNEL memdisk.bin >> APPEND initrd=firmwares/diag-Dell-PowerEdge-1955.img >> >>> I just tried it myself (with the equivalent to 3.40-pre12), and memdisk >>> works fine here... >> yes, it works fine on other systems, and I don't see what the problem >> might be on these ones :( > > could you provide a diff 3.36 which allows to see where memdisks fails? >You can see the entire change history at: http://git.kernel.org/?p=boot/syslinux/syslinux.git;a=summary> if it was C code, I'd liberally toss in some printfs to see what's > happening, but I've refrained to go for another round with assembler - > so far ... you should be able to do this much faster than I :) > > Thanks a lot in advance! :) > > Andreas > > P.S: I'm really amazed (in a negative way) in how many ways people come > up to accidentally (?) messing with software like yours ..Indeed. Unfortunately, firmware gets very poor testing. -hpa
Andreas Kotes
2007-Mar-20 20:46 UTC
[syslinux] memdisk from 3.36 crashing on Dell PowerEdge 1955
Hello again, * Andreas Kotes <count-linux at flatline.de> [20070315 19:03]:> ... and then nothing ... I've no idea what to try now .. unless you've > got any suggestions, I'll drop a mail to Dell Support tomorrow ...more findings: memdisk 3.31 works memdisk 3.35 doesn't memdisk 3.50 (git) says 'Error reading PBR' didn't dig deep enough into git to find out how to get to a specific revision (if there is something like a revision at all with git), so I didn't find out which patch broke it .. I'll be using memdisk from 3.31 for now, and will be happy to try code if this helps you. Best regards, Andreas -- "God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -- H.L.Mencken