Project Plan

From Syslinux Wiki

[edit] Project Plan GSoC2009 Claudiu

The task of converting the CLI from ASM to C can be broken down into two steps, each with its own number of sub-steps:

      1) Integrate the dynamic ELF module loading system into the core
             1a) Modify the core in order to be able to provide memory management functionality ( completed )
             1b) Since the ELF loader needs a shallow module, which provides basic symbol information for other more elaborate modules once they load
                 , modify the core to be able to represent the shallow module. This means providing an elf_module structure which will be initialized
                 statically with the symbols the ELF loader needs to funtion. As a side effect the shallow module loading code has become obsolete and
                 will be removed ( completed )
             1c) Modify the linking process in the core in order to make basic symbols ( malloc, string processing procedures etc ) available to
                 subsequently loaded modules. In particular this means modifying the library against which the core links, libcom32min.a instead of
                 libcom32.a, and modifying libcom32min.a as well as some aspects of the linking process in the core to eliminate some undifined and
                 duplicate symbols, as well as section overlapping. ( not fully completed yet )

      2) Integrate the configuration file parser and all its dependencies into the core
             2a) This means moving the configuration file parsing code into the core and making sure no dependencies are left behind. ( completed )
             2b) Modify all modules necessary for the user interface and transform them into dynamic elf modules. Once this is completed the user
                 interface can be very conveniently loaded and unloaded on demand, improving performance maintanance and the likes.
                 ( not fully completed yet ).
             2c) Modify extlinux, isolinux and syslinux to use the CLI ( not completed )