[syslinux] boot fails in a VMware player

[Spike White]

On  Fri, 14 Nov 2014 Didier wrote:

>From: Didier Spaier <didier at slint.fr>
>To: syslinux at zytor.com
>Subject: Re: [syslinux] Boot fails in a VMware player VM - syslinux
>        6.03
>On 13/11/2014 21:51, Ady wrote:
>
> > Realistically, less and less users are using optical media,
> > especially on newer computers (which are of course UEFI systems).

I strong disagree with this characterization, see below.

Less and less are using *physical* optical media.

>Yes. And if a computer is old enough not to be able to boot off an USB
>drive, it probably doesn't have an UEFI firmware anyway ;)

Most all the server provisioners in my company do all our server imaging
remotely.  That is, we attach virtual media from our desktop.  (Or a jump
server, if we're imaging from our house -- or a distant geographical
region).

I know a lot of larger companies are going that way, because you can hire
provisioners in a low-cost region and they can provision anywhere.

Only one time in the last 6 months I've physically gone to a box and
provisioned it.  (Its remote access controller was misbehaving).

When remotely provisioning, even on the newest models, your choices are:
   virtual CD/DVD, or
   virtual disk (or diskette)

Still today, Redhat & other vendors deliver their boot media on DVD.
It's convenient -- certainly during initial build development -- to
virtually attach a disk image (for the syslinux & ks.cfg) and also virtually
attach their boot DVD (for the squashfs.img stage 2 bootloader).

Could I develop the UEFI boot images without CD/DVD support?

Certainly.  I'm doing that now.  Doing my initial development w/ grub2,
then cutting over to syslinux (to get the pretty menus and screens, plus
a human-readable config file).

> > This means that investing resources in Syslinux development with the
> > specific goal of achieving bootable optical media in UEFI mode is
> > less "productive" than investing resources to achieve other
> > improvements / features. I'm not saying it won't happen - possibly by
> > adding some other, more-important features, then booting optical
> > media in UEFI mode might be also achievable.
>
>I can understand that. And fixing the remaining bugs that you've listed in
>previous posts, so that Syslinux 6.04 can be released and used by default
>by new versions of Linux distributions, is probably more urgent.
>
>Best regards,
>Didier

Agree. But recognize that while most distros deliver their full boot media
on
CD/DVD, with only a efidisk.img to get you to this CD/DVD, there will still
be a ton of users installing at least partially by DVD image.

Spike