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
B?chler 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 at zytor.com (H. Peter Anvin)
Maintained-by: hpa at 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