[syslinux] Dialog Menu System ?

[Darryl L. Miles]

I would like to create a dialog menu system.  That offered a little bit 
more than just select of what to boot.


Outline Requirements (ideals):

 * That would boot from pxe and keep using the basic ethernet card 
support (so are zero issues with future ethernet card compatibility, 
this rules out using a full operating systems like linux/dos/win32 
unless of course those OSes can be booted and retain the generic BIOS 
ethernet driver interface for their eth0 ?).

 * The dialog would be simple, based on 80x25 like text mode, looking 
much like Red Hat linux installs in text mode, or "make menuconfig" on 
Linux.

 * Simple widgets: menu / nagivation, command buttons, editable controls 
for: textbox, paragraphbox, radio, drop down, checkbox, ipaddress.

* The engine would load and execute as the operating system, like 
pxelinux.0 does, then load up a

 * The whole thing would be driven off TFTP which would load instruction 
scripts via a TFTP server for the current dialog.  Some minor 
modification might be made to the HPA TFTP server to allow CGI like 
execution of a server side script that generates the content of the file 
being "get".  Various environment variables would be passed to the CGI 
script, for example the MAC addr, IP addresses, ports numbers, etc...

 * The instruction sheet has a basic concept of variables, would be text 
based, kept simple like "default" is right now.

* There would be a simple mechanism to get and put variable values using 
a bespoke UDP protocol.  Maybe TFTP is an option here too.  This allows 
persisting of settings and state to the server.


Sound impossible ?  The hardest missing pieces from what I can see are 
mainly dialog widget/control related.

Is there an easy development environment for writing pxelinux.0 OS code 
?  Is it possible to run a network boot inside an PC architecture 
emulator.  Can GDB be used in anyway (serial/network) to debug things ?  
Or is the only way to compile, reboot and crash your victim test system?

Request for comments,

Darryl