[syslinux] Syslinux roadmap, revised

[H. Peter Anvin]

Hi all...

I'm looking once again at the Syslinux roadmap.  It seems to me that
we're going to have a very hard time making Syslinux 4.00 be the
full-featured everything-in-C release I had hoped for, or perhaps more
specifically, that it is justifiable to sit on the current
filesystems-in-C code waiting for the rest.

That would probably mean productizing the transitional COM32R module
format, unless a better solution for memory management can be found.

Looking forward, I have experimented with using lwIP for PXELINUX.  The
good news is that the performance is *very* good -- I have reliably
pulled about 250 Mbps over a local network, with peaks up to 600 Mbps.
The downside is that it requires architectural changes which may make it
*very* hard to support COM16 modules going forward.  This will obviously
break Gfxboot.

As such, I'm looking at revising the roadmap, and I'm partly asking for
input what it should look like.  One possibility is:

Syslinux 4 - Filesystems in C, COM32R, basic interfaces to support
Gfxboot as COM16.

Syslinux 5 - ELF linker, native TCP for PXELINUX, no COM16 support.

Syslinux 6 (or 5.something) - EFI support.

I'd like to get people's feel for the timeframes they care about these
features for...

	-hpa