Syslinux - Mar 2007 - 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

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

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

[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

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