H. Peter Anvin
2007-Mar-15 02:29 UTC
[syslinux] SYSLINUX 3.40-pre13 released -- major new library work
Hello all, I just pushed out SYSLINUX 3.40-pre13. Hopefully with the new kernel.org changes, it should already have been pushed out by the time you read this, instead of after a painful delay. Anyway, I finally got around to finishing the library support for the shuffle and boot interface (much thanks to my new employer, rPath, Inc.) As a demo of this functionality -- as well as being a requested feature -- I implemented a COM32 module to load an ELF kernel and run it in protected mode. The whole file is 286 lines, *including* comments, blank lines and fairly copious sanity checking. I highly recommend looking through it as an example on how to implement this kind of functionality; it is *extremely* powerful. The general principle of operation is to get the data you need into memory, *anywhere* in memory. Then the library automatically computes a sequence of memory moves in order for it to end up at the desired place in memory. Also, if you have a need to boot ELF-based protected mode kernels (someone asked me about QNX Neutrino recently?) it would be a good thing to test this stuff out. http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/boot/syslinux/Testing/ -hpa