[syslinux] SYSLINUX 3.70-pre1: development release

H. Peter Anvin hpa at zytor.com
Thu Feb 28 10:53:36 PST 2008


Luciano Rocha wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 01:55:44PM -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I have pushed out a prerelease of one of the development branches (I 
>> currently have three development branches open), 3.70-pre1.
> 
> Do you have a description of your current development branches, their
> goals and whishlists?
> 

Here is a rough summary.  I don't have a wishlist ready, but we can talk 
about it:


nolen	- eliminating any dependency on a priori length (3.70-pre*)

	The intent here is make it easier to support arbitrary network
	protocols, such as FTP and HTTP, as well as
	TFTP-to-other-protocol proxies.


bcopyint - unify all the real mode/protected mode machinery

	Right now, SYSLINUX has three separate pieces of machinery for
	real mode/protected mode transition, each of which have their
	own feature sets.  This branch works on unifying them to a
  	single, compact, and full-featured set.

	The longer term goal here is to enable ditching most of the rest
	of the real-mode assembly code in favour of protected-mode C
	code.


gptmbr	- Booting from GPT

	This is a branch to explore booting off disks formatted with GPT
	partition tables rather than classical MS-DOS partition tables.
	Most of the discussion about this has been on the GNU Parted
	mailing list.

	The GPT partition format is defined in the EFI spec, which of
	course assumes you're booting under EFI.  This being a somewhat
	speculative thing (shall we say), we have had discussions about
	booting GPT under BIOS.  There are two possible ways: a
	so-called hybrid partitioning scheme, and creating a native
	GPT partitioning protocol; this explores the latter.

	-hpa




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