[syslinux] Some thoughts of Syslinux 4 architecture

Geert Stappers stappers at stappers.nl
Mon Aug 18 04:06:51 PDT 2008


Op 20080816 om 16:30 schreef Roger Binns:
> 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!

Euh, that is where the COM32 modules come in.
See the com32 directory for more information.

> 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).

>From my point of view is that a request to duplicate Operating System
tasks into the bootloader.
I'm happy with bootloader that is just a bootloader.

> 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


Geert Stappers




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