[syslinux] Some thoughts of Syslinux 4 architecture

[Roger Binns]

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H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> So, I'm looking at what will be needed for the future of the Syslinux 
> architecture.

I haven't seen anywhere what your goals for syslinux are.  Are you
trying to take over all bootloading (ie also replace Grub and Lilo)?
The syslinux sweet spot currently seems to be booting anything except
hard disks (eg USB, network, CD) although extlinux blurs that.  And of
course "Linux" in the name implies other things are not supported or not
a priority (Windows etc).

What I'd like to see out of a bootloader is less handholding and
babysitting.  We have billions of processor cycles per second and
gigabytes of memory, yet I have to tell bootloaders in mind numbing
detail what choices to offer me and comprehensive details about those
choices.  This is software - it should be figured out automatically!

For example if I booted syslinux on my machine, it should automatically
figure out I have an ubuntu installation with two kernels (and which is
more recent), a cdrom, a network card, a windows xp installation on a
second drive and a bazillion USB ports that may have something
interesting plugged in.  The configuration files should most of the time
be unnecessary, or if present augment and override select bits of what
was autodiscovered.  My pxelinux.cfg/default file is almost 8kb of very
repetitive config settings (various 32 bit and 64 bit ubuntu livecd as
well as some stuff from the sysrescue cd).  You can pick random
conventions - eg if you arrange some files in certain ways on a CD, hard
drive or tftp server then they appear automatically in the boot config.
 (Control freaks can then override with a config file if they want
things done differently).

The goal should be that people don't need config files.  For the few who
do, they are so self evident that no documentation is needed.  And then
that things "just work" so that noone ever needs to post to the list.
Zero list traffic is success :-)

On a completely separate topic, I would love memdisk for iso images.
LiveCDs are very popular but they are a royal pain to network boot
usually requiring extracting them, finding kernels etc, trying to
finagle an nfs root into the cmdline.  Being able to just point at an
iso image over the network and have it boot would be great.  I
understand it could take up up to 800MB of memory.  The minimum I have
in any machine is 2GB so it wouldn't matter.

Roger
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