[syslinux] isolinux 2.01 bug with Compaq and Promise BIOS

[Patrick J. Volkerding]

On Sun, 13 Apr 2003, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> 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.

It's not quite as big an issue now that there's isolinux, but for a long
time the Slackware installer was a single 1.44MB floppy.  So, you start to
worry about running out of space.  Notice how much size gets tacked on
adding mtools:

-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     bin         16280 Feb  3  2002 /usr/bin/syslinux
-rwxr-xr-x    1 root     bin        139740 Apr 30  2002 /usr/bin/mtools

Of course, I'm sure you're aware of this.  I'd rather not have to add
mtools to our installer image (which is still under 2.88MB compressed),
but if I have to it's not that big a deal.  There's also the option of
installing a newer version of syslinux to the hard drive but keeping the
self-contained one in the installer.  I tend to approach syslinux upgrades
cautiously when things seem to be working, though...  I suppose that's
another reason.  :-)

Take care,

Pat