Syslinux - Apr 2009 - SYSLINUX 3.74 released

Well, here it is.  This is a historic Syslinux release -- it's the first 
one in 15 years in which the majority of the work was not done by 
myself; mostly because of the *huge* effort Erwan and Pierre have put in 
on HDT.

I also want to give a special thank you to my new(ish) employer, Intel 
Corporation, for letting me continue to work on Syslinux.  :)

 From here, onward and upward.  I have already bumped the version number 
of the master branch to 3.80.


Changes in 3.74:
         * New UI directive, which allows a more natural way to specify
           a menu system (or not.)  With the UI directive specifying
           the menu system, the DEFAULT directive can be used to select
           the default entry inside the menus.
         * kbdmap.c32: new module to load a new keyboard map
           dynamically.
         * isohybrid: workaround bug in some versions of binutils.
         * Fix issue with the placement of the initrd on some machines.
         * ifcpu64: fix handling of less than three arguments.
         * Fix bug in the shuffle library when dealing with a very
           large number of fragments.
         * Documentation fixes by Vicente Jimenez Aguilar.
         * gPXE updated to version 0.9.7.
         * hdt.c32: Hardware Detection Tool, an interactive hardware
           analyzer module by Erwan Velu.
         * MEMDISK: enable automatic determination of the disk geometry
           for a large floppy disk image if (and only if) it is
           formatted with a FAT filesystem.
         * SYSLINUX: fix the handling of .bss files on FAT12/16.
         * Suppress the Loading ... message if "quiet" is specified on
           the kernel command line.
         * Fix the use of "CONSOLE 0" with menu.c32.
         * Allow COM32 modules to be aware of all memory even in the
           presence of a memory hole.  The "linux.c32" module can be
           used to load a kernel (or memdisk) plus large initrd on
           such a system.
         * MBR: produce alternate MBR variants which force the drive
           number to hd0 (_f variants), or force the drive number to
           hd0 if the Ctrl key is pressed (_c variants.)  Furthermore,
           add an MBR variant (altmbr*.bin) which ignores the active
           flag and instead boots the partition number specified in the
           byte at offset 439 decimal.
         * Add IPAPPEND strings to com32 modules, especially needed for
           linux.c32.
         * New MENU SAVE directive which saves the latest menu
           selection until the next boot.  Currently only implemented for
           EXTLINUX.
         * gfxboot.com: *experimental* interface module to Steffen
           Winterfeldt's "gfxboot" graphical front end
           (http://gfxboot.sourceforge.net/).  Module by Sebastian Herbszt.

Begin3
Title:          syslinux
Version:        3.74
Entered-date:   2009-04-09

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
                 3800173 syslinux-3.74.tar.gz
                 4685618 syslinux-3.74.zip
Platforms:      DOS or Linux to install.  Linux, perl and nasm 0.98.39 or
                 later required to build from source.
Copying-policy: GPL
End

H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> Well, here it is.  This is a historic Syslinux release -- it's the 
> first one in 15 years in which the majority of the work was not done 
> by myself; mostly because of the *huge* effort Erwan and Pierre have 
> put in on HDT.
Hey peter,

Thanks for integrating HDT in Syslinux ! Syslinux 3.74  turns HDT 0.2.7 
as its first public release !

I would like to thank all testers of the so many HDT pre-releases, it 
had greatly improved the code & the stability before that first public 
release.

A special thank to Pierre for his great work on HDT. The next incoming 
release will feature his refactoring of the CLI, making it more scalable 
and feature-rich.
 From the user point of view, this will allow the next release of HDT to 
feature 'auto-completion' using the <tab> key.

Erwan,