Mailing List Archive

Syslinux 4.00 released
After 64 prereleases, 626 commits, 52,742 lines of changes, and tons of
work by many, many people, Syslinux 4.00 is now officially released.

Syslinux 4.00 is the first of a set of major code restructuring
releases. The single biggest new features are btrfs and ext4 support,
and support for disks larger than 2 TiB.

Huge thanks to:

- Intel, for sponsoring mine, Alek Du's and Feng Tang's work on
Syslinux (Feng's work will be included in a subsequent release);
- Shao Miller, Gert Hulselmans, Erwan Velu, Gene Cumm, and Thomas
Bächler for all your work and especially your work during the last
productization rush.
- Liu Aleaxander, Pierre-Alexandre Meyer, Steffen Winterfeldt,
Sebastian Herbszt, Ferenc Wagner and Paul Bolle for major
development work.
- Everyone else who have contributed or tested!

Changes in 4.00:
* Major code base changes; all filesystem rewritten in C.
This work was done primarily by Liu Aleaxander (Yuanhan Liu).
* EXTLINUX: btrfs and ext4 support. btrfs support was done by
Alek Du of Intel.
* EXTLINUX is no longer a separate derivative; extlinux and
syslinux both install the same loader (ldlinux.sys); for the
Linux-based installers the extlinux binary is used for a
mounted filesystem; the syslinux binary for an unmounted
filesystem.
* When loading a new configuration file with the CONFIG
command, one can now also specify a new current directory
with an APPEND statement.
* Full ADV support for Syslinux, to boot-once and MENU SAVE
works.
* Full support of GPT-partitioned disks, including disks
and/or parititions larger than 2 TiB (if supported by BIOS.)
* The GPT handover protocol adjusted to the current T13
committee draft; see doc/gpt.txt.
* HDT: code cleanup, small bugfixes
* The "linux" syslinux installer (syslinux-nomtools) now has a
command-line syntax closer to the extlinux installer. The
mtools, dos and win32 installers will get this new syntax
eventually, but it is not implemented yet.
* chain.c32: support booting GPT partitions by index, GUID,
label.
* chain.c32: support booting the Syslinux partition with "fs".
* chain.c32: implement gpt.txt hand-over protocol.
* chain.c32: support for chainloading Grub stage 2.
* PXELINUX: TFTP URL syntax (tftp://) supported even when not
running gPXE/gpxelinux.
* New ls.c32 module to display the contents of the disk from
the command line, and pwd.c32 to display the current
directory.
* rosh.c32 (read only shell) updated and hopefully usable.
* PXELINUX: Support "localboot -1", just like the other
derivatives.
* gfxboot.com removed in favor of gfxboot.c32.
* New MENU HELP statement to display fullscreen help text as a
result of a menu selection.
* memdiskfind utility that can be used with the phram driver
in the Linux kernel to mount a memdisk.
* ifcpu.c32: Adding usage when no parameters are given,
adding PAE support.
* ifcpu.c32, ifcpu64.c32: handle more than one argument per
target.
* isohybrid: C version which does not require Perl.
* New command MENU IMMEDIATE to permit hotkeys to activate
immediately without needing Enter.
* mdiskchk.com supports a --no-sequential (or -n) option to
suppress the classic all-drive-probing heuristic. Useful
on BIOSes who crash/hang when certain drive numbers are
probed.
* ElTorito.Sys DOS driver now scans drive numbers upwards
instead of downwards, in order to avoid a fairly common
bug on some BIOSes where probing drive 0xFF causes a
failure.

Begin3
Title: syslinux
Version: 4.00
Entered-date: 2010-06-28
Description: SYSLINUX is a collection of boot loaders for the Linux
operating system which operates off Linux ext2/3
filesystems, MS-DOS FAT filesystems, network servers
using PXE firmware, or from CD-ROMs. The FAT
filesystem version can be installed from DOS, NT, or
Linux.

It includes a sophisticated API for add-on "COM32"
modules, including a significant subset of the
standard C library.

It also includes MEMDISK, a tool to boot legacy
operating systems from nontraditional media like PXE
or CD-ROM.

This version includes gPXE, to allow accessing network
files via other protocols than TFTP.

Keywords: syslinux pxelinux isolinux extlinux msdos boot loader
floppy install network ext2 ext3 pxe iso9660 cdfs
memdisk com32
Author: hpa@zytor.com (H. Peter Anvin)
Maintained-by: hpa@zytor.com (H. Peter Anvin)
Primary-site: ftp.kernel.org /pub/linux/utils/boot/syslinux
4972489 syslinux-4.00.tar.gz
6106109 syslinux-4.00.zip
Platforms: DOS, Win32 or Linux to install. Linux, perl and NASM
2.03 or later required to build from source.
Copying-policy: GPL, MIT
End

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