Syslinux - Oct 2016 - [PATCH] Fix for crash with certain EFIs

Thank you very much for this, I have been running into this issue a number
of times but could never get a firm grip on it.

Especially HP Gen9 proliants seem to suffer from it by sometimes throwing a
stack dump very early in the boot. In the past we worked around it by
forcing bios boot.

 

After rebuilding it with -mno-red-zone the problem appears to be fixed, at
least after a couple of hours of testing I have not seen it anymore.

 

One comment:

 

--- syslinux-6.03-orig/mk/efi.mk

+++ syslinux-6.03/mk/efi.mk

@@ -17,6 +17,9 @@

endif

ifeq ($(ARCH),x86_64)

        ARCHOPT = -m64 -march=x86-64

+ifdef EFI_BUILD

+       ARCHOPT = -mno-red-zone

+endif

 

I would do this (add a plus):

 

       ARCHOPT += -mno-red-zone

 

Thanks,

 

Jur van der Burg.

> Thank you very much for this, I have been running into this issue a number
> of times but could never get a firm grip on it.
> 
> Especially HP Gen9 proliants seem to suffer from it by sometimes throwing a
> stack dump very early in the boot. In the past we worked around it by
> forcing bios boot.
> 
>  
> 
> After rebuilding it with -mno-red-zone the problem appears to be fixed, at
> least after a couple of hours of testing I have not seen it anymore.
> 
 
Have you tried 6.04-pre1 or later? With pre-built binaries?

Would you please clarify? Are you saying that 6.04-pre1 is failing too, 
but building 6.03 with this proposed patch is working correctly?

Regards,
Ady.

PS: In my previous email I wrote "2016Nov"; of course I meant 2015Nov.

Hi Ady,

Would it work if we removed "ifdef EFI_BUILD" condition and just add
-mno-red-zone for all x86_64 builds? If not, do you have any ideas how
to pass this flag?

This could work, because the patch is adding the -mno-red-zone flag
only for x86_64 builds, which are only used in the form of the efi64
target. The efi32 and bios targets are both 32-bit.

BTW. I also tried 6.04-pre1 and top of tree on the systems where the
problem occurs and syslinux would crash, unless it was rebuilt with
the -mno-red-zone flag.

Best Regards,
- Chris

On Tue, Oct 18, 2016 at 9:14 PM, Ady Ady via Syslinux
<syslinux at zytor.com> wrote:
>
>> Thank you very much for this, I have been running into this issue a
number
>> of times but could never get a firm grip on it.
>>
>> Especially HP Gen9 proliants seem to suffer from it by sometimes
throwing a
>> stack dump very early in the boot. In the past we worked around it by
>> forcing bios boot.
>>
>>
>>
>> After rebuilding it with -mno-red-zone the problem appears to be fixed,
at
>> least after a couple of hours of testing I have not seen it anymore.
>>
>
> Have you tried 6.04-pre1 or later? With pre-built binaries?
>
> Would you please clarify? Are you saying that 6.04-pre1 is failing too,
> but building 6.03 with this proposed patch is working correctly?
>
> Regards,
> Ady.
>
> PS: In my previous email I wrote "2016Nov"; of course I meant
2015Nov.
>
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