[syslinux] No thanks for breaking third-party applications

[Gene Cumm]

snipping...

On Thu, Nov 6, 2014 at 9:23 AM, Thorsten Glaser <t.glaser at tarent.de> wrote:

> The MirBSD bootloader actually took advantage of COMBOOT to
> provide access to SYSLINUX storage and other things. It was
> integrating nicely. Why did you take this away?
>
> bye,
> //mirabilos

Though not official, I can try to offer some insight.

The branch that lead to the 5.xx series was known as elflink and
involved rewriting in C essentially everything that was in ASM (though
there's still some ASM glue).  Preserving COMBOOT functionality would
require rewriting its code also in C.  Two reasons for the rewrite in
C are increased maintainability and portability for the (then)
upcoming multiarch build in the firmware branch.  This added EFI32 and
EFI64 functionality.

I believe some reasons the COMBOOT functionality was not rewritten
were a perceived low benefit for the likely large cost and time
limits.  In my (unofficial) opinion, if it were reimplemented, it
would be best as a library (ie libcbt.c32) which would eliminate the
payload from the core and make it a little easier to only build for
BIOS (the sole possible platform).

-- 
-Gene