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[syslinux] Thank you for Syslinux 5.00

François Laverdure city_design at progression.net
Thu Dec 6 13:16:02 PST 2012 
Now WOW!
This version actually boots fine on my netbook!
So I want to send all the developers a very warm thank you for releasing 
this version.
You guys totally rock!

Cheers!

François

On 06/12/2012 15:20, Matt Fleming wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> Syslinux 5.00 is out in time for the holidays. This release includes a
> lot of changes from 4.06. I've included the NEWS entries below, which
> highlight the major changes.
>
> Lots of assembly code has been rewritten in C, which makes further
> development much easier (and also really helped for the 'firmware'
> abstraction that appears in Syslinux-6.00-pre1). So be on the lookout
> for regressions in this release when compared with 4.0x, though many
> bugs have been hammered out thanks to some excellent testing and
> feedback from various people.
>
> The COMBOOT stuff has been removed and now all modules are ELF objects,
> which allows us to do some neat things with symbols at runtime and
> provides the groundwork for more advanced things in the future.
>
> And we've also now got XFS filesystem support.
>
> Happy hacking.
>
> ---
>
> Changes in 5.00:
>          * com32: Switched from the COM32 object format to ELF as it is
>            a much more powerful format that allows undefined symbols to
>            be resolved at runtime and dynamic loading of module
>            dependencies, which means modules now become shared object
>            files instead of statically linked binaries - reducing both
>            disk space and runtime memory consumption.
>          * core: Split non-core functionality into ldlinux.c32, which
>            is an ELF module loaded by the core that contains everything
>            the core doesn't require to boot the system, e.g. config
>            parser, command-line interface, etc.
>          * Replaced __intcall() calls with direct function calls now
>            that we can resolve undefined symbols at runtime, thanks to
>            the ELF object support. Now that we no longer need to go
>            through the 16-bit interrupt mechanism we can make full use
>            of the 32-bit execution environment. This change required
>            reimplementing lots of the 16-bit assembly code from core/
>            in C.
>          * com32: __com32.cs_bounce is gone now we always run in a
>            32-bit environment once we execute ldlinux.c32.
>          * ldlinux: A new "PATH" directive was added to the ldlinux.c32
>            config parser that specifies a colon-separated list of
>            directories to search when attempting to load modules.
>          * ALL: Delete all references to/code for 16-bit COMBOOT files.
>            COMBOOT files (.cbt and .com) are no longer supported under
>            Syslinux.
>
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