[syslinux] Problems with gfxboot.c32

Colin Watson cjwatson at ubuntu.com
Fri Jun 20 07:31:32 PDT 2014


On Thu, Jul 04, 2013 at 12:52:20PM +0100, Matt Fleming wrote:
> On Thu, 04 Jul, at 08:45:33AM, Andreas Heinlein wrote:
> > Looks like you're right. I added '*.tr *.hlp *.pcx back.jpg
> > gfxboot.cfg langlist' to the 'bootlogo' archive, and now I get the
> > menu, and everything seems to work!
> > 
> > If that's really the only problem, I wouldn't consider this a bug.
> > IIRC, the 'unpacked' form of gfxboot archives is a special case of
> > SYSLINUX anyway, grub expects/needs the files in their packed form.
> > Then this change just needs to be documented somewhere
>  
> If it's true that the unpacked archive was always a Syslinux only
> feature than I'm happy to mark that feature as deprecated, especially
> given that there's such a simple upgrade path (move everything into the
> archive).
> 
> If anyone is absolutely relying on the old behaviour and has a concrete
> reason we need to continue to support it, shout out.

Sorry for not noticing this thread for such a long time.  We only ran
across this rather recently when we switched to syslinux 6 and found
that our boot menu broke ...

This is really pretty problematic for us.  Yes, it's possible for us to
work around this change by adding some more files to the packed archive,
and I'll probably do that in the short term.  However, some of these
files are required outside the archive as well (gfxboot.cfg at least),
and so that means we'll end up duplicating things; and the image files
routinely have to be changed by people customising Ubuntu images, which
is a pretty common use case for us.  I anticipate this being a
non-trivial source of confusion for people building images based on
ours.

I'm sure it isn't trivial to reintroduce the COMBOOT API.  Is there any
other sensible way that this feature might be reintroduced?

(Incidentally, the statement about GRUB above makes little sense to me,
unless maybe it's talking about GRUB 1.  GRUB 2 is perfectly happy to
read files directly off an ISO9660 filesystem or basically whatever else
it comes across.)

Thanks,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]


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