[syslinux-announce] SYSLINUX 3.70 released

[H. Peter Anvin]

Hello everyone,

I have just released SYSLINUX 3.70, which is the first version which 
includes gPXE for support of non-TFTP network scripts, as well as a 
large number of other enhancments.  gPXE support is still somewhat 
experimental - in particular it still doesn't support chaining other NBPs.

Very special thanks to:

- rPath, Inc, my employer, for the uncountable hours I've spent
   to develop this version of SYSLINUX.
- The Etherboot Project, for gPXE.
- Everyone who has tested and submitted patches and comments.

The changes:

Changes in 3.70:
         * PXELINUX: Support enhanced capabilities when running on top
           of gPXE (http://www.etherboot.org/).  In particular, support
           URL-style syntax for filenames, and any protocol that gPXE
           supports (except, currently, iSCSI and AoE.)  This feature
           is currently highly experimental.
         * Substantial infrastructure changes to support files whose
           length aren't known at open time (typically network
           connections.)  Please note that the semantics of some of the
           comboot APIs have changed slightly; please see
  	  doc/comboot.txt.
         * PXELINUX: We no longer require a TFTP server which supports
           the tsize option for all transfers.
         * PXELINUX: Integrate with the gPXE source base; unified image
           now included as "gpxelinux.0".
         * The source tree has been restructured; files that were
           previously in the root have moved into the core, dos, gpxe,
           and utils directories.
         * "make install", "make netinstall", and "make extbootinstall"
           have been updated massively.  "make install-all" now installs
           all three.
         * Change default dir for auxiliary files from
           /usr/lib/syslinux to /usr/share/syslinux.
         * SYSLINUX: VFAT long filename support.
         * MEMDISK: Any image less than 4096K (4 MB) is treated as a
           floppy disk.  The geometry-guessing code will recognize all
           common extended formats, but it is still possible some very
           exotic formats need geometry specification.  Large floppies
           and very small harddisks still need explicit specification.
         * chain.c32: option "swap" to support swapping of BIOS drive
           numbers.  This is necessary to boot certain operating systems
           (DOS, Windows) from a secondary drive.
         * chain.c32: option "file=" to support loading a boot file from
           the SYSLINUX filesystem instead of loading the boot sector
           from the drive.
         * chain.c32: option "seg=" to control the load location.
         * chain.c32: option "ntldr=" as a shorthand for "seg=0x2000
           file="; use this to load one of WinNT's loaders:

           chain.c32 hd0 1 ntldr=/MiniNT/setupldr.bin

           Note that the file needs to be in the SYSLINUX filesystem.
         * chain.32: options "freedos=" and "msdos="/"pcdos=" as
           shorthands for "seg=0x60 file=" and "seg=0x70 file="
           respectively; use this to load FreeDOS's kernel.sys, MS-DOS's
           io.sys or PC-DOS's ibmbio.sys.
         * Change to the A20 algorithm which *MIGHT* help systems that
           have systems which freeze when Syslinux is used with USB
           keyboards.  Note that this has been hard do verify, so I
           would greatly appreciate feedback on it.
         * Complex menu system: unbreak menus which has unnamed
           submenus, like complex.c.
         * Fix newline on the serial port for some com32 modules.
         * chain.c32: support "boot" as the drive specification,
           indicating the drive from which it was booted
	  (for syslinux/extlinux).

Begin3
Title:          syslinux
Version:        3.70
Entered-date:   2008-06-30

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
                 3954517 syslinux-3.63.tar.gz
                 4739459 syslinux-3.63.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