Syslinux - Oct 2004 - patch: SDI Xpe images support for pxelinux

Hi,

I added support in pxelinux for SDI (Wndows XP embedded images) files
a few time ago for specific needs. It works well (at least for me atm)
and I think I can now submit it to this list.

I get a very good improvement in speed over the traditional way of
loading SDI images.

* Links :

The 'diff -urN' patch for syslinux-2.11 (documentation included) :
http://remile.free.fr/pxelinux/pxelinux_sdi_support-0.1.0.patch

The patched pxelinux.0 binary :
http://remile.free.fr/pxelinux/pxelinux.0

The documentation included in the patch (with the extension changed to .txt) :
http://remile.free.fr/pxelinux/sdi.txt

* The dots display while loading the image might not be very adapted
to big images (SDI have at max a size of 500MB) and eye candy, but I
didn't want to make an intrusive patch (load_high and everything which
uses it would have been impacted) and size of code matters.

* I'm really not sure about copyright notes that should be included in
the header and the documentation, so if you have advices...

* On a side note about syslinux web page "Notes on problematic
hardware", I can report that the PXE implementation of the virtual
network card VMXNET from vmware GSX 3.1 seems to support well
fragmentation. I made a custom version of pxelinux with 65k fragmented
UDP packets and got very good tftp transfer rates. Sadly, I found no
real network card which supports it.

Syslinux and Nasm are great, thanks for that.

Best regards,

- R?mi Lef?vre -

R?mi Lef?vre wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I added support in pxelinux for SDI (Wndows XP embedded images) files
> a few time ago for specific needs. It works well (at least for me atm)
> and I think I can now submit it to this list.
> 
> I get a very good improvement in speed over the traditional way of
> loading SDI images.
> 
Any particular reason these can only be loaded from the network, as 
opposed to, for example, CD?

	-hpa

No particular reason except the fact that I only tested SDI loading
with pxelinux.
I made a generic patch for syslinux/pxelinux/isolinux. I think it
should work because SDI support is built on top of getfssec and
load_high, but there is no warrant at the moment.
I removed unused parts and display less information messages in
syslinux to reduce the program size.

New generic patch:
http://remile.free.fr/syslinux/syslinux_sdi_support-0.1.2.patch

Patched version of pxelinux.0:
http://remile.free.fr/syslinux/pxelinux.0

Patched version of isolinux.bin (not tested):
http://remile.free.fr/syslinux/isolinux.bin

Patched version of ldlinux.bin (not tested):
http://remile.free.fr/syslinux/ldlinux.bin

Quickly updated documentation (included in the patch):
http://remile.free.fr/syslinux/sdi.txt

- R?mi Lef?vre -

On Sat, 02 Oct 2004 12:49:57 -0700, H. Peter Anvin <hpa at zytor.com>
wrote:
> R?mi Lef?vre wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I added support in pxelinux for SDI (Wndows XP embedded images) files
> > a few time ago for specific needs. It works well (at least for me atm)
> > and I think I can now submit it to this list.
> >
> > I get a very good improvement in speed over the traditional way of
> > loading SDI images.
> >
> 
> Any particular reason these can only be loaded from the network, as
> opposed to, for example, CD?
> 
>         -hpa
>