Syslinux - Mar 2014 - Very slow download with pxelinux > 4.07 on specific hardware

?Hi,?

On 10 March 2014 18:13, Eric PEYREMORTE <eric.peyremorte at
iut-valence.fr>wrote:
> Ok i give up. I will stick with the old version version (4.07) which works
> well with dell 380 and 790.
>
> I tried to understand what happened between 4.07 and 5 but i don't have
> the skill to understand low level c.
>
> Seems that the memory management changed a lot, maybe the culprit. But as
> many other things changed this is not obvious...
>
?sad to say, we have exactly the same problem. With HTTP downloads it is
much worse, we could not find a stable and reliable version after 4.x.
Sadly nobody wanted to fix our syslinux problem, even as paid development.

I very much hope that the syslinux project will overcome these obstacles.
It would be sad to see all the new development stay unused because if this.

Regards,
Schlomo

On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 6:52 PM, Schlomo Schapiro <schlomo at
schapiro.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On 10 March 2014 18:13, Eric PEYREMORTE <eric.peyremorte at
iut-valence.fr>wrote:
>
>> Ok i give up. I will stick with the old version version (4.07) which
works
>> well with dell 380 and 790.
>>
>> I tried to understand what happened between 4.07 and 5 but i don't
have
>> the skill to understand low level c.
>>
>> Seems that the memory management changed a lot, maybe the culprit. But
as
>> many other things changed this is not obvious...
>>
>
> sad to say, we have exactly the same problem. With HTTP downloads it is
> much worse, we could not find a stable and reliable version after 4.x.
> Sadly nobody wanted to fix our syslinux problem, even as paid development.
>
> I very much hope that the syslinux project will overcome these obstacles.
> It would be sad to see all the new development stay unused because if this.
It's also a balance of time.  While working on 4.10-pre*/5.10-pre*, I
found that some hardware misreports its behavior.  "Sure, Interrupts
work" but they don't is but one that I worked around on specific
hardware.

-- 
-Gene

On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 7:15 PM, Gene Cumm <gene.cumm at gmail.com>
wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 10, 2014 at 6:52 PM, Schlomo Schapiro <schlomo at
schapiro.org> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On 10 March 2014 18:13, Eric PEYREMORTE <eric.peyremorte at
iut-valence.fr>wrote:
>>
>>> Ok i give up. I will stick with the old version version (4.07)
which works
>>> well with dell 380 and 790.
>>>
>>> I tried to understand what happened between 4.07 and 5 but i
don't have
>>> the skill to understand low level c.
>>>
>>> Seems that the memory management changed a lot, maybe the culprit.
But as
>>> many other things changed this is not obvious...
>>>
>>
>> sad to say, we have exactly the same problem. With HTTP downloads it is
>> much worse, we could not find a stable and reliable version after 4.x.
>> Sadly nobody wanted to fix our syslinux problem, even as paid
development.
>>
>> I very much hope that the syslinux project will overcome these
obstacles.
>> It would be sad to see all the new development stay unused because if
this.
>
> It's also a balance of time.  While working on 4.10-pre*/5.10-pre*, I
> found that some hardware misreports its behavior.  "Sure, Interrupts
> work" but they don't is but one that I worked around on specific
> hardware.
>
> --
> -Gene
Simple test (and boot failure is an option as long as the core's
messages are intact).  Could both of you try fetching
Syslinux-4.10-pre22 (zip versus tar is your choice), extract out
core/pxelinux.0 and boot with it then record the 4-digit value for
flags (in the "UNDI: baseio" line) and the first 3 octets (6 hex
digits including 0s) of the MAC address and take a reasonable screen
shot (I find a cell phone against a solid object to be pretty decent
when angled to reduce glare and distanced for proper focus) but don't
bother sending the picture yet.  It's possible that the workaround I
utilized can either be having a negative impact or needs to be
extended to more hardware.

Attached you'll find an image with the two pieces highlighted.

--
-Gene
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On 03/10/2014 04:15 PM, Gene Cumm wrote:
> 
> It's also a balance of time.  While working on 4.10-pre*/5.10-pre*, I
> found that some hardware misreports its behavior.  "Sure, Interrupts
> work" but they don't is but one that I worked around on specific
> hardware.
> 
The odd part is that people are reporting this even using the legacy PXE
implementation (not lpxelinux.0)...

	-hpa