7.1 i386 PXE

[Andriy Gapon]

on 09/10/2008 23:17 Oliver Fromme said the following:
> Jeremy Chadwick wrote:
>  > Dmitriy Kirhlarov wrote:
>  > > I tryin update my install server. Look like 7.1 i386 pxe boot broken.
>  > > My own release build is 7.1-i386-2008-10-05
>  > > 
>  > > Could somebody test this functionality and confirm or disprove my results.
>  > 
>  > What's broken about it?  What behaviour happens?  Are you aware of the
>  > mfsroot bug (see step 7 below):
>  > 
>  > http://jdc.parodius.com/freebsd/pxeboot_serial_install.html
> 
> It is a problem with memory management in the boot loader.
> I hit exactly the same problem during my experiments with
> the graphical boot loader, even without PXE and mfsroot
> involved.  The problem is that the btx client breaks and
> behaves erratically when it runs out of memory.  By default
> it can only use a part of the lower 640 KB of RAM, which
> isn't very much, given that the loader binary itself is
> already 250 KB, and the gzip decompressor requires quite
> some temporary memory for its dictionary.
> 
> Unfortunately, debugging these things in the boot loader
> isn't exactly trivial.  You can't just load it into gdb
> and single step it.

On a tangent - would running this under qemu with gdb stub enabled (qemu
-s) and then connecting with remote gdb help?
I am not sure about debugging symbols but raw assembly you should be
able to track.


-- 
Andriy Gapon