[syslinux] SYSLINUX 3.70-pre1: development release

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

--On Thursday, February 28, 2008 11:24:42 AM -0800 "H. Peter Anvin" 
<hpa at zytor.com> wrote:

> H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>> 	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.

This scares me, a lot more than it used to.  Recently I've run into a 
number of systems on which the USB keyboard emulation stops working when 
you switch into 32-bit protected mode.  I've been able to work around this 
using a comboot program which detects the offending machines and either 
offers to downgrade the BIOS or drops back into the CLI rather than running 
a com32 menu program.  I don't expect this approach to have much effect if 
PXELINUX itself is mostly a 32-bit protected mode program.

Unless you're planning on including a USB stack...

> I should point out that I'm in a pretty advanced stage about discussing
> doing a PXELINUX-gPXE hybrid with the gPXE development team.

This has also made me nervous for some time, but I can't quantify why, so 
I'll continue to wait and see.

-- Jeffrey T. Hutzelman (N3NHS) <jhutz+ at cmu.edu>
   Carnegie Mellon University - Pittsburgh, PA