[syslinux] feature requests for 3.01

[H. Peter Anvin]

One thing on all of this: have you considered using a preprocessor and 
just use a Makefile to process them on the server?

Jim Cromie wrote:
> 1.   \ at end of lines (in pxelinux.cfg/default, etc) causing/allowing
> line-wrap ?
>    for those of us who prefer 80 column screens, and 1 item per line.

This MIGHT be doable.  It's trickier than it sounds, though, as the 
config-file parser is still pretty grotty code, and might make people 
who use PXELINUX against Windows TFTP servers very unhappy.

> 2.   label-specific APPEND  adds onto global APPEND
>    ( currently replaces it IIUC )
>    maybe this needs a separate keyword ADDAPPEND
>    (255 char limit still applies im sure)

This is probably doable.

> 3.   strip trailing # comments
>    ( I havent verified that it currently blows up)
>    it would be great if strip happens before '\' EOL line catenation,
>    thus allowing

This is unlikely to happen; there are too many places where # are 
legitimate.

> LABEL foo              # everyone needs a foo
>    kernel vmlinuz     
>    APPEND   console=ttyS0,19200n81 \  # default on soekris
>         panic=20 \ # gotta read screen
>         root=/dev/nfs \
>         nfsroot=/nfshost/foo,soft,async \
>         # squeeze out whitespace inc linewrap?; s/\s+#.*\n/msg
>         ip=192.168.42.100:192.168.42.1:192.168.42.1:255.255.255.0:soekris:eth0
> 
> 4. INITRD as separate label
>    not 'needed' if 1 is done.

Denied; additional complexity for no gain.  If anything I'd like to get 
away from adding magic to options (things that can't be done from the 
command line); it makes pushing UI into comboot modules harder. 
LOCALBOOT was definitely a mistake.

> 5. warn when kernel bootline is > 255 chars
>     iirc - this is a kernel limit.  would be nice to catch it rather
> than mysterious failures
>     esp as IPAPPEND adds further stuff on end.

This would be useful, I'll consider doing that.  It may or may not be 
practical, but it would be good.

The reason it might not be practical is that there may be too many 
places at which truncation can happen.

> 6. NOCONSOLE 1  option
>     I often use pxelinux to boot my soekris box, which spews lots of
> Escape sequences to the serial line, and this makes my terminal
> emulator window unreadable.  According to a post on soekris-list, iits
> a soekris bios issue, but
> it would be nice to have a work-around
>  
> 8/11/04, attributed to you:
> I encountered this problem before. H. Peter Avin (author of
> sys/iso/pxelinux) gave me the answer that it was improper handling of
> serial i/o on the part of the soekris' bios. I haven't checked yet,
> but the release notes for comBIOS 1.26 seem to promise a fix for this
> problem, so you should probably try upgrading to that.

I presume this means disabling the primary (VGA) console.  It might be 
doable; I will consider it.  It's not really trivial, though.

	-hpa