[syslinux] Problems with gfxboot.c32

[Sebastian Herbszt]

Colin Watson wrote:
> 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.

Can you please explain which files are required outside the archive?
gfxboot should pull all files (including gfxboot.cfg) from the archive.

> 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,

AFAIK gfxboot does not support GRUB 2; it works with Syslinux, LILO and GRUB 1.

Sebastian