[syslinux] Some thoughts of Syslinux 4 architecture

[H. Peter Anvin]

So, I'm looking at what will be needed for the future of the Syslinux 
architecture.

One thing that keep coming up is that people want to combine things that 
  are normally associated with chain loading, specifically MEMDISK and 
disk swapping (from chain.c32) with other things like Linux kernels, and 
recursiveness.

Stefan's ELF loading support is obviously crucial to be able to keep 
data structures in memory as it provides continuity of data structures 
across modules.

In particular, I'm thinking of an architecture which would call into 
various modules, with MEMDISK being a module, and accumulate changes 
onto a shuffle list as it goes along, with the final invocation of 
shuffle_and_boot making this active.

There are, unfortunately, a number of potential hiccups with this. 
First of all we have the distinction of real-mode versus protected-mode 
invoked modules (which could be dealt with by a transition stub), things 
that we don't know a priori where they want to end up (things that need 
to be stuffed at end of DOS memory, especially, since we don't know that 
until cleanup time) and so on.

Anyway, thinking about it now...

	-hpa