Mailing List Archive: Including multiple configuration files

Including multiple configuration files

May 22, 2007, 11:49 AM

Post #1 of 3 (1570 views)

Due to a large number of targets, I'm working on a menu based PXE system
to ease finding the difficult to remember obscure labels. I'd like to
split these up into separate menus, and thus in multiple configuration
files. However, in doing this, I don't want to sacrifice the ability to
type in any label at the main boot prompt, but I also dont' want to
maintain duplicate entries of a particular label. While I see the
options "MENU INCLUDE" and the ability to append multiple filenames to
the menu.c32 target, I don't believe there is currently any way for the
core syslinux to handle information in multiple files. Is this correct?
Is there any technical reason this isn't possible? It would simplify
my configuration if such a feature were implemented. Without it, I
imagine I'll just take all the sub-menu config files and concatenate
them together to form a core syslinux configuration.

Also, is there any functional difference between the use of MENU INCLUDE
vs appending multiple files to the menu.c32 target?

Thanks,
Joel Ebel

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Re: Including multiple configuration files [ In reply to ]

hpa at zytor

May 22, 2007, 12:35 PM

Post #2 of 3 (1500 views)

Permalink

Joel Ebel wrote:
> Due to a large number of targets, I'm working on a menu based PXE system
> to ease finding the difficult to remember obscure labels. I'd like to
> split these up into separate menus, and thus in multiple configuration
> files. However, in doing this, I don't want to sacrifice the ability to
> type in any label at the main boot prompt, but I also dont' want to
> maintain duplicate entries of a particular label. While I see the
> options "MENU INCLUDE" and the ability to append multiple filenames to
> the menu.c32 target, I don't believe there is currently any way for the
> core syslinux to handle information in multiple files. Is this correct?
> Is there any technical reason this isn't possible?

Yes. The core of syslinux is written in assembly, and the memory
management issues in the assembly code makes maintaining multiple open
buffers infeasible. The menu system is written in C and doesn't have
this limitation.

I have been planning to move sizable chunks of syslinux to C, but that's
a huge project.

> It would simplify
> my configuration if such a feature were implemented. Without it, I
> imagine I'll just take all the sub-menu config files and concatenate
> them together to form a core syslinux configuration.

Using a server-side make is probably the best option. Note that the CLI
also has a limit on the number of labels which the menu system doesn't
(including hitting [Tab] in the menu.)

> Also, is there any functional difference between the use of MENU INCLUDE
> vs appending multiple files to the menu.c32 target?

No.

-hpa

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Re: Including multiple configuration files [ In reply to ]

hpa at zytor

May 22, 2007, 7:36 PM

Post #3 of 3 (1487 views)

Permalink

H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>
> Yes. The core of syslinux is written in assembly, and the memory
> management issues in the assembly code makes maintaining multiple open
> buffers infeasible. The menu system is written in C and doesn't have
> this limitation.
>

<sheepishly>Bullshit.</sheepishly> I just realized that this was true
at one point, but isn't anymore -- the infrastructure changes that were
necessary to support blksize (PXELINUX), FAT32 (SYSLINUX) and EXTLINUX
already take care of the necessary extra buffering. ISOLINUX currently
doesn't use it, but the SYSLINUX/EXTLINUX variant should carry straight
over with minimal changes.

Maybe this isn't even all that hard to do.

-hpa

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