[syslinux] SYSLINUX 3.70-pre1: development release

[H. Peter Anvin]

Jeffrey Hutzelman wrote:
> --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.
> 

I have only heard of one specific BIOS version of one specific Dell 
machine.  I probably could find a workaround for it if I had access to a 
specimen, but I don't.

>> 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.

Any large changes has the potential to break stuff.

	-hpa