[syslinux] SYSLINUX 3.70-pre1: development release

[H. Peter Anvin]

H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 

I should point out that I'm in a pretty advanced stage about discussing 
doing a PXELINUX-gPXE hybrid with the gPXE development team.  The 
general idea is pretty much to remove everything below the COM32 level 
and replace it with an enhanced version of gPXE.  We're still working 
out the details, but an initial analysis seems to indicate that it 
should be technically entirely feasible.  As part of that, a lot of C 
code would have to be written which can be reused as part of a rewritten 
SYSLINUX core for non-network media, too.

	-hpa