[syslinux] Looking for testers and advise about ISOLINUX within ISO 9660

[Thomas Schmitt]

Hi,

Dag Wieers wrote:
> I think it is important to understand that the isohybrid functionality is 
> fairly new and largely untested on a wide range of hardware. So I would be 
> cautious to change the default behaviour to realize later that it fails 
> consistently on certain types of hardware.

I understand from the code of util/isohybrid
that the ISOLINUX user is supposed to produce a
specially enabled isolinux.bin as first step.
Else util/isohybrid would run into this:

79 if ($ibsig ne "\xfb\xc0\x78\x70") {
80     die "$0: $file: bootloader is missing isolinux.bin hybrid signature\n".
81   "Note: isolinux-debug.bin does not support hybrid booting\n";
82 }

So a libisofs isohybrid feature could recognize the
specially enabled isolinux.bin file and handle
it as obviously intended.
That would be "auto" and quite convenient.

On the other hand there could be a risk to encounter
the signature by incident and to produce a MBR which
leads to an unsuitable boot image.
That would be outruled by chosing "off" as default
and be a bit less convenient.

Is there this risk ? How bad would it get ?


Have a nice day :)

Thomas