[syslinux-announce] Syslinux 4.00 released

[H. Peter Anvin]

After 64 prereleases, 626 commits, 52,742 lines of changes, and tons of
work by many, many people, Syslinux 4.00 is now officially released.

Syslinux 4.00 is the first of a set of major code restructuring
releases.  The single biggest new features are btrfs and ext4 support,
and support for disks larger than 2 TiB.

Huge thanks to:

- Intel, for sponsoring mine, Alek Du's and Feng Tang's work on
  Syslinux (Feng's work will be included in a subsequent release);
- Shao Miller, Gert Hulselmans, Erwan Velu, Gene Cumm, and Thomas
  Bächler for all your work and especially your work during the last
  productization rush.
- Liu Aleaxander, Pierre-Alexandre Meyer, Steffen Winterfeldt,
  Sebastian Herbszt, Ferenc Wagner and Paul Bolle for major
  development work.
- Everyone else who have contributed or tested!

Changes in 4.00:
        * Major code base changes; all filesystem rewritten in C.
          This work was done primarily by Liu Aleaxander (Yuanhan Liu).
        * EXTLINUX: btrfs and ext4 support.  btrfs support was done by
          Alek Du of Intel.
        * EXTLINUX is no longer a separate derivative; extlinux and
          syslinux both install the same loader (ldlinux.sys); for the
          Linux-based installers the extlinux binary is used for a
          mounted filesystem; the syslinux binary for an unmounted
          filesystem.
        * When loading a new configuration file with the CONFIG
          command, one can now also specify a new current directory
          with an APPEND statement.
        * Full ADV support for Syslinux, to boot-once and MENU SAVE
          works.
        * Full support of GPT-partitioned disks, including disks
          and/or parititions larger than 2 TiB (if supported by BIOS.)
        * The GPT handover protocol adjusted to the current T13
          committee draft; see doc/gpt.txt.
        * HDT: code cleanup, small bugfixes
        * The "linux" syslinux installer (syslinux-nomtools) now has a
          command-line syntax closer to the extlinux installer.  The
          mtools, dos and win32 installers will get this new syntax
          eventually, but it is not implemented yet.
        * chain.c32: support booting GPT partitions by index, GUID,
	  label.
        * chain.c32: support booting the Syslinux partition with "fs".
        * chain.c32: implement gpt.txt hand-over protocol.
        * chain.c32: support for chainloading Grub stage 2.
        * PXELINUX: TFTP URL syntax (tftp://) supported even when not
          running gPXE/gpxelinux.
        * New ls.c32 module to display the contents of the disk from
          the command line, and pwd.c32 to display the current
          directory.
        * rosh.c32 (read only shell) updated and hopefully usable.
        * PXELINUX: Support "localboot -1", just like the other
          derivatives.
        * gfxboot.com removed in favor of gfxboot.c32.
        * New MENU HELP statement to display fullscreen help text as a
          result of a menu selection.
        * memdiskfind utility that can be used with the phram driver
          in the Linux kernel to mount a memdisk.
        * ifcpu.c32: Adding usage when no parameters are given,
          adding PAE support.
        * ifcpu.c32, ifcpu64.c32: handle more than one argument per
          target.
        * isohybrid: C version which does not require Perl.
        * New command MENU IMMEDIATE to permit hotkeys to activate
          immediately without needing Enter.
        * mdiskchk.com supports a --no-sequential (or -n) option to
          suppress the classic all-drive-probing heuristic.  Useful
          on BIOSes who crash/hang when certain drive numbers are
          probed.
        * ElTorito.Sys DOS driver now scans drive numbers upwards
          instead of downwards, in order to avoid a fairly common
          bug on some BIOSes where probing drive 0xFF causes a
          failure.

Begin3
Title:          syslinux
Version:        4.00
Entered-date:   2010-06-28
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
                4972489 syslinux-4.00.tar.gz
                6106109 syslinux-4.00.zip
Platforms:      DOS, Win32 or Linux to install.  Linux, perl and NASM
	 	2.03 or later required to build from source.
Copying-policy: GPL, MIT
End