[syslinux] Syslinux 6.00 released

[Matt Fleming]

On Mon, 01 Jul, at 12:07:48PM, Igor Sverkos wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Matt Fleming wrote:
> >> [...]
> >>
> >> Debian will copy *everything* from inc. When it is an ia64 system,
> >> they will remove the ia32 and x84_64 headers (so you should be unable
> >> to build syslinux in ia64 on Debian, too).
> >
> > To my knowledge, Syslinux has not been tested on ia64. Despite the fact
> > that it uses a version of EFI, I very much doubt it would work out of
> > the box without quite a bit of hacking.
> 
> Well, this wasn't my point. I don't care about i64 :)
> 
> I just wanted to say, that per default, gnu-efi will only install the
> headers for your architecture. So when you are on x86_64, gnu-efi will
> only install x86_64 related files. No ia32 and or ia64 for example.
> When you now call "make efi32" on syslinux source, to get a
> EFI-version of syslinux, this call will fail, because syslinux will
> require ia32 headers, which aren't installed by gnu-efi's Makefile per
> default as I thought I'd explained in my previous mail (if I am not
> wrong).
> 
> Debian seems to have a workaround: Their changes to gnu-efi will
> override gnu-efi's default behavior. On an x86_64 system on Debian,
> you will end with x86_64 headers *and* ia32 headers, that's why you
> are able to call 'make efi32' on Debian x86_64 systems.
> 
> So my question is:
> 1) Is gnu-efi's behavior right? Should gnu-efi only install x86_64
> headers on a x86_64 system and no ia32 (and or ia64 headers)?
> 
> Maybe there's just a mistake and they forgot to also install ia32 on x86_64.

I would have thought that package developers would usually want to make
two separate packages for the i386 and x86_64 headers/libraries. Either
way, that's a distro-specific choice. For the record, most people will
want to be building for x86-64 anyway because there are so few i686 EFI
firmware implementations in the wild.
 
> 2) If gnu-efi's behavior is right, is it than correct to depend on
> ia32 in syslinux ('make efi32')? Or do we need another switch to build
> an EFI-version for x86_64 only?
 
You can already build just x86_64 with 'make efi64'. For more info see
doc/building.txt in the 6.xx source.

-- 
Matt Fleming, Intel Open Source Technology Center