[syslinux] Re: pxelinux kernel fails vaio c1mzx

Patrick J. LoPresti patl at users.sourceforge.net
Tue Dec 10 05:55:15 PST 2002


"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa at zytor.com> writes:

> Once again, WITH FEELING...
> 
> 	DON'T NAME YOUR KERNEL SOMETHING ENDING IN .bin
> 
> This is getting to be such an FAQ it's silly.  Anyone want to maintain a
> FAQ for this mailing list?

If lots of people have the same question, it usually means there is a
flaw in the design or in the documentation.

Searching all of the .doc files in the SYSLINUX 2.0 distribution, the
only reference I can find to .bin files is this section of
syslinux.doc:

    The following extensions are recognized (case insensitive):

      none or other	Linux kernel image
      .cbt		COMBOOT image (not runnable from DOS)
      .bss		Boot sector, DOS superblock will be patched in [SYSLINUX only]
      .bs		Boot sector [SYSLINUX only]
      .bin		"CD boot sector" [ISOLINUX only]
      .com		COMBOOT image (runnable from DOS)
      .img		Disk image [ISOLINUX only]
      .0		PXE bootstrap program (NBP) [PXELINUX only]


This text pretty clearly states that .bin is recognized by "ISOLINUX
only".  I suggest you at least fix the documentation.

On the other hand, I do not think this is only a documentation
problem.  A .bin suffix has a long history of meaning "just a bunch of
bytes", the historic equivalent of application/octet-stream.  To
interpret it differently than no suffix is a mistake, in my opinion,
because it will confuse people.

Could you use a different suffix for CD boot sectors?  Failing that,
is there any validation you could do on .bin files?  That is, could
you look for some signature for CD boot sectors (or Linux kernels)?

 - Pat



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