[syslinux] Preview of SYSLINUX Dynamic ELF Modules Support

[Stefan Bucur]

Greetings everyone,

As my work on SYSLINUX as a Google Summer of Code student is
approaching the deadline (only one week left), I would like to
publicly announce the availability of a ready-to-test preview of
SYSLINUX dynamic module loading support.

Currently, SYSLINUX offers support for only loading one module at a
time, represented in the COM32 format. This means that whenever
another functionality in another module is required, the current
module would need to be unloaded, to make place for the second one.
Moreover, code from the klibc library needs to be duplicated in every
module that is using it.

My SYSLINUX GSoC project is solving these problems (and more), by
providing a platform for loading and dynamically linking relocatable
ELF modules. While this platform is aimed to integrate into the
SYSLINUX core and replace the current COM32 implementation, the
current stage of the project offers a preview of it through a COM32
root module that subsequently loads and executes dynamic ELF modules.

You can find more details regarding the current status of the project,
how to obtain the source code and more at this address:

http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php/GSoC2008_Stefan_Announcements#11_August_2008_-_Preview_.22Release.22

I appreciate any feedback / bug reports / use case suggestions that
would help me better design the module subsystem. Even if I won't have
the time to implement all the features in the wishlist before the GSoC
official deadline, I will continue to maintain and improve the code
afterwards.

I cannot finish without giving the well deserved credits :) I would
like to express my profound appreciations relative to my awesome
mentor, hpa, who guided me through the required research for the
project, and provided me some very valuable advice regarding code
development. More than that, he was an extraordinary person too meet
both online and in the real life. I thank him for all his patience
with me and I hope my work here will prove useful in the long term and
raise to the high engineering standards of SYSLINUX. I also appreciate
the rest of the SYSLINUX community, with a special mention of Erwan
Velu and Marty Connor, who were very supportive and made the #syslinux
channel a source of inspiration and fun :).

Cheers,
Stefan Bucur