[syslinux] SYSLINUX 3.70-pre1: development release

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

--On Thursday, February 28, 2008 03:51:02 PM -0800 "H. Peter Anvin" 
<hpa at zytor.com> wrote:

> Jeffrey Hutzelman wrote:
>> --On Thursday, February 28, 2008 11:24:42 AM -0800 "H. Peter Anvin"
>> <hpa at zytor.com> wrote:
>>
>>> H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>>>> 	The longer term goal here is to enable ditching most of the rest
>>>> 	of the real-mode assembly code in favour of protected-mode C
>>>> 	code.
>>
>> This scares me, a lot more than it used to.  Recently I've run into a
>> number of systems on which the USB keyboard emulation stops working when
>> you switch into 32-bit protected mode.  I've been able to work around
>> this  using a comboot program which detects the offending machines and
>> either  offers to downgrade the BIOS or drops back into the CLI rather
>> than running  a com32 menu program.  I don't expect this approach to
>> have much effect if  PXELINUX itself is mostly a 32-bit protected mode
>> program.
>>
>
> I have only heard of one specific BIOS version of one specific Dell
> machine.

Unfortunately, we have a lot of those -- they were the recommended 
workstation for over a year, and old hardware never seems to go away around 
here.

>  I probably could find a workaround for it if I had access to a
> specimen, but I don't.

I do, and I could even find some time to track this down, if I thought a 
workaround was likely.  But I'll have to spend some time (re)reading code 
before I can even begin to guess.

-- Jeff