[syslinux] isolinux 2.01 bug with Compaq and Promise BIOS
H. Peter Anvin
hpa at zytor.com
Sun Apr 13 16:05:26 PDT 2003
[Please don't take threads like these private. They're much better
handled in public.]
Patrick J. Volkerding wrote:
>
> On Sun, 13 Apr 2003, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>
>>P.S. Why are you trying 2.01 and not 2.03?
>
> I'll field that one. Slackware's using 2.01 because there's limited space
> on the installer disc, and I don't want to have to put mtools on there.
> It'd be great to see a future compile option to _not_ have an mtools
> dependancy. After all, we're not ever planning to ship syslinux setuid,
> which I seem to recall was the reason for the change. (Really, IMHO you'd
> have to be nuts to install something like syslinux that way)
>
The whole reason is to not require running setuid while supporting
what's quite necessary to a lot of people -- installing on a disk image.
This was among other things a precondition for getting rid of the
(broken) Linux kernel bootsector.
Note that this only applies to the installer -- i.e. what you need to
build a boot floppy or similar. I find it a bit hard to understand what
particular environment would have a strong size dependency and still
only be used for that purpose. I'm willing to be enlightened, though,
but I don't want to spend the time messing with it unless I understand
what the need is.
-hpa
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