[Soekris] PXE booting delay

[Kevan Benson]

On Friday 13 January 2006 05:23, Russell Howe wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 12, 2006 at 05:10:40PM -0800, Kevan Benson wrote:
> > Whenever PXE booting the net4801 to linux, after downloading the
> > pxelinux.0 file the soekris starts displaying weird characters in the
> > upper left corner
>
> I *think* this is a symptom of using the version of pxelinux which
> outputs to both serial port and VGA text console.
>
> There's a patched one somewhere which outputs to just one of them.

To better explain what I meant earlier when I mentioned weird characters in 
the upper left corner, I'm seeing this:
------------------------
co3BIOS ver. 1.28  20050529  Copyright (C) 2000-2005 Soekris Engineering.
 M
net4801

0128 Mbyte Memory                        CPU Geode 266 Mhz 

Pri Mas  SanDisk SDCFB-512               LBA 993-16-63  500 Mbyte
------------------------

Notice where the bios line is?  The third character from the left cycles to a 
random character about once a second, and after a while, it jumps the the 
first character, and then to the line below and over a character before back 
up.

You know, I just noticed it's actually the pxelinux output.  The slow cycling 
of characters is actually SLOWLY spelling out the pxelinux text, and the 
occasional jumps are carriage returns and line feeds.  It looks like you are 
correct in thinking it's because of the VGA output.  What I don't understand 
is how the "console 0" flag in the default file is supposed to work when 
pxelinux.0 is outputting stuff BEFORE it downloads that file...

Either way, I'm real interested in that patch...

-- 
- Kevan Benson
- A-1 Networks
- 707-570-2021 x102