[syslinux] syslinux: Please provide -m and -a options on Linux

[Ferenc Wagner]

Jeff Sadowski <jeff.sadowski at gmail.com> writes:

> On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 5:38 PM, H. Peter Anvin <hpa at zytor.com> wrote:
>
>> On 09/01/2010 02:27 PM, Daniel Baumann wrote:
>>>
>>> http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=595170:
>>> [...]
>>> Please consider adding support for the -m and -a options.
>>> [...]
>>> it would be nice if you could add said functionality.
>>
>> Yes, it would.  It is very complex, however, because of the flexibility that
>> Linux provides.
>
> couldn't tis just be done with a couple system calls? using a simple
> dd to copy the mbr.bin and parted to set the active partition.

The interesting part is finding out where to copy mbr.bin and which
partition to set active, just think about the Linux RAID support.  And
it will be complicated further by LVM for example.  However, some pretty
general code is already available for this, albeit not integrated into
Syslinux.  Furthermore, as the original reporter added, the simplest
case is also the most common one: installing Syslinux onto a USB stick.
Maybe that would be reasonable to support first, then slowly extend
towards the more complicated cases.
-- 
Regards,
Feri.