[syslinux] Is Syslinux still in active development?

[Frantisek Rysanek]

On 12 Aug 2022 at 17:03, Turritopsis Dohrnii Teo En Ming wrote:
>
> I found that Syslinux is being used in many Linux distro ISO
> installers. I am just surprised that there have been no new releases
> for the past 8 years.
> 

Again, speaking my own mind, not from a position of authority:

Yes indeed, the particular "personality" of syslinux, called 
isolinux, has been used to boot from ISO CD/DVD media in legacy BIOS 
mode for many years. The alternative would probably be the "floppy 
emulation boot" = an even older style, allowing you to load the 
kernel in yet other ways... Isolinux uses the so-called "no-emulation 
boot", which once was the progressive way (two decades ago?) and is 
probably the most popular bootloader with that capability.

Note that legacy BIOS has been deprecated for how long... a decade, 
or thereabouts? And during that time, it has not developed any 
longer. Definitely not in those aspects / interfaces that are used by 
syslinux.
UEFI has fought hard to take over the rule, and has managed that a 
few years ago in the office and in the datacenter, and the time has 
probably come as well by now in the industrial/embedded PC segment 
(which has struggled, in the best tradition of its inertia / 
resistance to change).

With UEFI, all the "firmware services" are different, and the boot 
media format is different too - I mean the elements related to the 
boot sequence, the chain-loading of bootloader stages, the software 
interfaces involved.

Apparently, other bootloaders were quicker to pick up that UEFI 
gauntlet.

I mean to say that unless HPA et al have too much time on their hands 
(which they probably do not), there's not much point in converting 
syslinux to UEFI. I'd agree that competition is healthy and nice to 
have, but with UEFI the air of open firmware interfaces has gotten 
somewhat bittersweet. I cannot blame anyone that he doesn't want to 
code against that as a hobby. Even speaking of coding as a hobby, 
there are other areas that are more fun and bring more satisfaction.

So... other than this front of progress (follow suit and convert to 
UEFI), during the years, Syslinux has kept adding various goodies and 
capabilities on other fronts. I myself have stayed with PXElinux 3.x 
for a long time. Newer versions have brought some eye candy and 
actual useful features, but e.g. the new menu style and graphics (in 
v5/v6) have never quite worked for me, so I gave up on those 
upgrades. I need the bootloader to do its core job first and foremost 
= reliably load my OS images and work reliably across a wide variety 
of hardware.

Technical progress can be a nuissance, and it just happens :-)

The CD/DVD/ISO is nowadays legacy technology, just like the BIOS.
Does anyone still burn CD's nowadays? How many new machines still 
have optical drives? Rather, I tend to observe people flashing 
ISO9660 images onto USB thumb drives, which feels to me like fitting 
a square peg into a circular hole. Makes me wonder how isolinux still 
fits in there somewhere :-)
Booting off an emulated CD drive in a virtualized environment, where 
you just submit the ISO image file, and there's no quirky physical 
optical hardware involved - that works nicely, and will probably be 
with us for quite some time. With those of us who still maintain our 
own servers, even if virtualized, not necessarily on premises...

Frank