Hello,
starting with stable kernel 6.6.18 we have problems with PXE booting. A bisect shows that the following patch is guilty:
From 768171d7ebbce005210e1cf8456f043304805c15 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Ard Biesheuvel ardb@kernel.org Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2023 09:00:55 +0000 Subject: x86/boot: Remove the 'bugger off' message
Signed-off-by: Ard Biesheuvel ardb@kernel.org Signed-off-by: Ingo Molnar mingo@kernel.org Acked-by: H. Peter Anvin (Intel) hpa@zytor.com Link: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20230912090051.4014114-21-ardb@google.com
With this patch applied PXE starts, requests the kernel and the initrd. Without showing anything on the console, the boot process stops. It seems, that the kernel crashes very early.
With stable kernel 6.6.17 PXE boot works without problems.
Reverting this single patch (which is part of a larger set of patches) solved the problem for us, PXE boot is working again.
We use the packages syslinux-efi and syslinux-common from Debian 12. The used boot files are /efi64/syslinux.efi and /ldlinux.e64.
Our config-File (for 6.6.80) is attached.
Regarding the patch description, we really do not boot with a floppy :-)
Any help would be greatly appreciated, I have a bit of a bad feeling about simply reverting a patch at such a deep level in the kernel.
Thank you and best regards
Ulrich