Syslinux 2 Changelog

Changes in 2.13

• MEMDISK: Fix command-line parsing "brown paper bag" class bug.
• MEMDISK: Add "raw" mode to support the DOS boot disk from WinME/XP, which seems to deliberately crash the system when someone uses the "INT 15h mover" highmem API.
• Make "make install" do something sane for the com32 development environment.
• In the spec file, create a separate -devel RPM for the com32 development environment.

Changes in 2.12

• Simple C library, based on klibc, for writing COM32 programs.
• Fix the handling of file length in loading of COM32 programs.
• MEMDISK: Work around a linker bug by rearranging the code to not use the linker for the 16-bit code.
• SYSLINUX: If we're building on a machine without a Win32 (mingw) compiler, just skip building syslinux.exe.
• ISOLINUX: Support non-mkisofs mastering programs, at least as long as the image is single-session. For best results, ISOLINUX should be the only boot loader installed.
• MEMDISK: Allow the user to specify that the simulated disk should be write-protected.

Changes in 2.11

• ALL: Add an API call to get the configuration file name.
• SYSLINUX: Fix bug in 2.10 that prevented it from working correctly for a lot of people.
• SYSLINUX: In the installer, make mtools a bit less fussy.
• Make the menu system compile with newer gcc's.

Changes in 2.10

• MEMDISK: Handle images compressed with zip as well as with gzip. Some Windows-based image tools apparently generate these kinds of images by default. Patch by Patrick LoPresti.
• Major menu improvement from Murali Ganapathy.
• ISOLINUX: Wonderfully sick and brilliant workaround for severe bugs in certain Award BIOSes; from Knut Petersen.
• SYSLINUX: Fix for the nomtools installed, from Frederic Pasteleurs.
• PXELINUX: Fix handling of IP numbers in the ranges 100-109 and 200-209.
• ALL: New option "allowoptions" (defaults to 1), which controls if options are allowed on the command line or not.
• SYSLINUX: Support building under klibc (see the klibc distribution for details.)

Changes in 2.09

• SYSLINUX: Remove residual setuid crap from syslinux-nomtools.
• Handle video pages correctly when using the API functions.
• Handle compiling on an x86-64 platform correctly.
• Menu system from Murali Krishnan Ganapathy; see the menu directory for information.
• COMBOOT: Allow COMBOOT programs to change screen text mode.
• COMBOOT: Correct the documentation of how to detect SYSLINUX from COMBOOT!!!!
• COMBOOT: Fix "get key without echo" API function.
• SYSLINUX: Fix bug that affected the API open function.
• ALL: Improve the E820 memory parser, to work around some buggy BIOSes.

Changes in 2.08

• Add new configuration command "ontimeout" to allow timeout to have a different action than just pressing Enter.
• Add new configuration command "onerror" to allow a custom command to be executed in case the kernel image is not found.
• Fix bugs in the COMBOOT/COM32 command-line parsing. APPEND now works with COMBOOT/COM32 images.
• PXELINUX: Poll for ARP requests while sitting at the prompt. This makes some boot servers a lot less unhappy.
• PXELINUX: Actually free sockets when we get a failure (including file not found.) This bug would cause us to run out of sockets and thus "go deaf" after a while.
• MEMDISK: Add an API to query for the existence of MEMDISK.
• SYSLINUX: Fix loading boot sectors (.bs/.bss) from floppy disk.
• .c32 is now one of the extensions searched for automatically.
• PXELINUX: RFBG.exe seems to randomly overwrite memory location 0x5700. Thus, don't use it!
• PXELINUX: Change pathname length max from 63 to 127; change max vkernels from 128 to 64.
• Support Ctrl-U -> kill entire command line input.
• The "samples" directory contains a (barely at all tested) chain loading example, chain.c32, which may be used to chainload local floppy disks and hard disks. Use with "chain fdN" or "chain hdN [partition]"; N = 0 for the first drive of each type.

Changes in 2.07

• MEMDISK: Workaround for BIOSes which go into a snit when they get a RESET command for the floppy system when there is no floppy in the system.
• PXELINUX: Add "ipappend 2", which passes the hardware address of the boot interface to the kernel as acommand-line option.
• mkdiskimage: fix the generation of the end limit.
• PXELINUX: Fix multiple bugs in chainloading of other NBPs.
• MEMDISK: Fix bug that would occationally cause "ran out of input data" when using compressed disk images.
• SYSLINUX: Updates for the win32 installer (from Lars Munch.)
• PXELINUX: PXELINUX-specific options are now recognized both in a vendor-option-space (a.k.a. type 43 encapsulated) as well as in a site-option-space (unencapsulated.)
• COM32: Don't crash when DS != 0.
• COMBOOT/COM32: Make file reading work correctly. Thanks to Phung Chi Kien for submitting a test program.

Changes in 2.06

• ALL: Fix problem that would occationally cause a boot failure, depending on the length of the kernel.
• ISOLINUX: Fix problem that would occationally cause a boot failure, depending on the length of directories.
• SYSLINUX: Win32 installer now flushes buffers.
• ppmtolss16: Be fully compliant with the PNM spec; actually process comments in the header and odd alignments of the various parameters, as well as "plain" (not raw) files and PBM and PGM files.
• PXELINUX: Lower the default MTU to 1472 in order to deal with systems with slightly nonstandard MTUs, and PXE stacks which don't defragment correctly. Unfortunately this is very hard to test dynamically.

Changes in 2.05

• PXELINUX: Add a default query based on the hardware address of the boot device. This is in lower case hexadecimal form separated by dashes and including the hardware type, for example, the Ethernet (type 1) address 88:99:AA:BB:CC:DD would query the file pxelinux.cfg/01-88-99-aa-bb-cc-dd.
• PXELINUX: Fix bug involving non-IP-based config file names.
• SYSLINUX: New installer for WinNT-based systems, from Lars Munch.
• MEMDISK: Fix handling of memory region overlap when decompressing. Thanks to Mikhail Kupchik for identifying the problem.

Changes in 2.04

• ALL: Reclaim even more low memory by observing that comboot_seg === real_mode_seg is perfectly fine, and by the fact that the 1000h segment managed to get unused in all derivatives...
• PXELINUX: Attempt to negotiate full Ethernet-sized blocks (1468 bytes) using the blksize option.
• SYSLINUX: Resurrect the old no-mtools version of the installer, although as a root-only tool. Some distributors have indicated that they need a small standalone installer.
• MEMDISK: Fix a memory offset computation error when installing compressed disks which generally would cause 1 MB of memory to be wasted.
• MEMDISK: Fix installing the E820 memory map. Calling INT 15h AX=0E820h with MEMDISK 2.03 loaded would give a completely corrupt memory map.
• SYSLINUX: Make libsyslinux a dynamic library, so that it can be updated separately from client programs. The whole idea, after all, is to enable alternate programs to become syslinux installers.
• Include an rpm spec file in the distribution, so rpmbuild -ta works.

Changes in 2.03

• Actually support comment lines in the configuration file.
• PXELINUX: Try to resolve some problems with stack switches.
• PXELINUX: Handle PXE stacks with broken routing. With these workarounds, the remote install PXE boot floppy (rbfg.exe) from Argon Technologies should work correctly.
• Fix problems with Perl scripts in UTF-8 locales.
• You probably need NASM 0.98.34 or later to compile this version. 0.98.36 is recommended.
• MEMDISK: Now supports gzip compressed images.

Changes in 2.02

• SYSLINUX: Security flaws have been found in the SYSLINUX installer when running setuid root. Rewrite the SYSLINUX installer so it uses mtools instead. It therefore now requires mtools (specifically mcopy and mattrib) to exist on your system, but it will not require root privileges and SHOULD NOT be setuid.

Changes in 2.01

• MEMDISK: Fix memory sizing bug when the ramdisk crosses the 16 MB boundary.
• MEMDISK: Add a "pause" option to stop immediately before booting, to read off the messages.
• MEMDISK: Support disk images with DOSEMU headers.
• Update the mkdiskimage script to handle newer mtools versions, and be able to generate disk images with DOSEMU headers (controlled by the -d option).
• Fix the COM32 sample program.
• PXELINUX, ISOLINUX: Fix some COMBOOT API calls.
• PXELINUX: Doc fix.
• Build SYSLINUX into a small library for encapsulation into other programs (however, please keep in mind this is a GPL'd library.)
• SYSLINUX: Make installer work with "owner" in /etc/fstab.
• SYSLINUX: Fix issue with working on nonpartitioned hard disk devices. THIS CONFIGURATION IS NOT RECOMMENDED.

Changes in 2.00

• ALL: Add support for "COM32" (32-bit COMBOOT) images.
• ALL: Add an API for COMBOOT/COM32 images. See comboot.doc for details. There is a C development environment for COM32 being created; it should be ready at some point in the future.
• Fix mbr.asm so that it actually works.
• SYSLINUX: The syslinux installer *SHOULD* now be safe to run setuid root.
• PXELINUX: Fix bug where PXELINUX would override random chunks of the UNDI code segment! Thanks to Kevin Tran for finding this bug.
• ISOLINUX: Fix a bug related to slashes in pathnames.
• ISOLINUX: Fix a bug in handling initrds over 128 MB.
• ALL: Make the <Ctrl-V> key print out the version; this is to help debugging.
• Add a small script, mkdiskimage, to create a DOS-formatted hard disk image using mtools. This may be useful in conjunction with MEMDISK.
• ISOLINUX: Search for a /boot/isolinux directory as well as /isolinux.
• ALL: Fix a bug related to very long configuration files.
• PXELINUX: Work around a NASM bug which would result in no delay before reset if an error occurs.