[syslinux-announce] SYSLINUX 3.50 released

H. Peter Anvin hpa at zytor.com
Sat Jun 9 16:38:05 PDT 2007


Well, SYSLINUX 3.50 has been in development since September of last year
(it was originally a branch off 3.31), and the diff against 3.36 is
almost 15,000 lines.

I doubt it's going to be bug free, but prereleases can only get you so
far with respect to testing.  Thus, it's time to push the button and
getting this thing out into the world.

I hereby announce SYSLINUX 3.50.

Special thanks to my new employer, rPath, Inc. for allowing me the time
to work on this.  There has been a lot of time spent over the last few
months.

Changes in 3.50:
        * New keywords allow the type of file to be specified in the
          configuration file.
        * It is now supported to load a different configuration file
          with the CONFIG keyword.
        * Fix API call 0x0019 (Read Disk.)
        * MENU AUTOBOOT, MENU TABMSG, MENU PASSPROMPT allows
          internationalization of menu messages.
        * A new feature, TEXT HELP, allows the administrator to set
          a multi-line help message for individual selections.
        * Fix API call 0x0012 (Cleanup, shuffle and boot.)
        * New API call "Cleanup, shuffle and boot to flat protected
 	  mode"
        * New API call "Cleanup, shuffle and boot to real mode",
          similar to API call 0x0012 but allows arbitrary register
	  setting.
        * Introduce a library interface for loading arbitrary binary
          formats with relatively easily understood code.  See
          the elf.c32 module for an example on how to use it.
        * New module "elf.c32", to load a protected-mode ELF kernel.
        * MBR (old and new): Fix bug in CHS mode when LBA >
          65535*sectors.
        * vesamenu: fix decoding of palettized PNG images.
        * Update the Linux kernel boot protocol.
        * PXELINUX: Press Ctrl-N at the boot prompt to read out the
          network info.
        * Instead of the (non-existent) MAC, use the client identifier
          for networks like Infiniband and Firewire/1394.
        * Add a new INCLUDE command to the core syslinux parser.
        * Allow binding help text to F11 and F12.
        * F-key help now available in the simple menu system.
        * Disabled the polling for ARP during idle.  It is simply too
          slow on some (broken!) PXE stacks.
        * PXELINUX: also try to fetch the config file based on UUID.

Begin3
Title:          syslinux
Version:        3.50
Entered-date:   2007-06-09

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.

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
                1922353 syslinux-3.50.tar.gz
                2213851 syslinux-3.50.zip
Alternate-site: ibiblio.org /pub/Linux/system/boot/loaders
Platforms:      DOS or Linux to install.  Linux, perl and nasm 0.98.38 or
                later required to build from source.
Copying-policy: GPL
End



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