Difference between revisions of "Changelog"

Revision as of 08:46, 28 December 2007

Changes in 3.54:

• Add "menu separator", "menu indent", "menu disabled" (see README.menu).
• vesamenu: fix handing of VESA modes with noncontiguous memory buffers. In particular, Qemu/KVM sets up such a mode when Cirrus Logic emulation is enabled (which is the default.)
• Support for calling real mode functions using far calls, with argument on the stack. This was implemented to support the BIOS BBS specification, but subsequent experiments show that the at least one of the most common BIOS cores, Award, passes the presence check but doesn't actually implement the functionality.

Changes in 3.53:

• Fix bugs related to the $PnP BIOS functionality on some platforms.
• PXELINUX: Fix the "naked" version of :: (suppress prefix.)
• elf.c32: better error messages.
• Faster operation under Intel VT virtualization.
• PXELINUX: Fix DHCP bootfile option.
• mkdiskimage: Support more than 1024 cylinders.
• (Hopefully) fix installer on non-x86 platforms.
• Fix shuffle_and_boot_rm, used by linux.c32.
• Fix shuffle_and_boot_pm on 386/486.
• ISOLINUX (at least): fix bss memory overwrite hang.
• MBR: Fix booting from logical partitions.
• Code cleanups.

Changes in 3.52:

• Handle capitalized F-key commands in the menu system.
• Fix padding error when loading multiple ramdisks.
• Workaround for VMware crashing when trying to print a message during early kernel boot (does not seem to work, consider deleting.)
• chain.c32: add the ability to search for a specific MBR signature at runtime.
• Fall back to the server identity option if the siaddr field in the DHCP header isn't set. This seems to match the behaviour of most PXE stacks.
• mkdiskimage: give the generated disk image an MBR signature.
• MEMDISK: Fix failures on some BIOSes.
• Simple menu system: new "MENU HIDDEN" option to not display the menu unless the user presses a key.
• Simple menu system: support MD5-encrypted passwords (modern Unix standard style, with "$1$" prefixes.)
• pcitest.c32: now functions as a full "lspci". Thanks to Erwan Velu for this work.
• MEMDISK: Make EDD actually work.
• ISOLINUX: Fix for certain broken CD-ROM BIOSes which randomly corrupted register FS.
• Simple menu system: fix memory overwrite bug that caused some systems to lock up or behave weirdly.
• Fix building on 64-bit systems without a 32-bit libc installed.

Changes in 3.51:

• EXTLINUX: Fix failure to find the configuration file.

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.
• SYSLINUX/EXTLINUX: New RAID mode (-r) which calls the BIOS to load the next device (typically the next drive) on boot failure.

Changes in 3.36:

• MEMDISK: Disable EDD by default on floppy disks. EDD can be enabled with the "edd" option and disabled with "noedd". This (hopefully) should make Ghost work again.
• SYSLINUX: "unix" installer now uses Linux ioctls instead of using libfat.
• New MBR which can boot from logical partitions.
• SYSLINUX: Fix bug in detecting special extensions which was introduced in 3.35 :(
• PXELINUX: Unbreak chainbooting FreeBSD (and possibly others.)

Changes in 3.35:

• MEMDISK: New "safeint" mode.
• MEMDISK: Be more compliant with the PnP BIOS spec.
• MEMDISK: Turn on EDD support by default.
• MEMDISK: Try to work on some machines on which it would not work when there was no floppy drive in the system.
• Simple menu system: fix serial console support (broken in 3.30).
• SYSLINUX: Support subdirectories. Like ISOLINUX, the "current directory" is the directory in which syslinux.cfg is found; this is searched for in the sequence /boot/syslinux, /syslinux, /. As a side benefit, label names like "linux-2.6.18" and "linux-2.6.19" are now supported.
  
  To install ldlinux.sys in a subdirectory, pass the -d directory option to the SYSLINUX installer.
  
  This work was sponsored by slax.org (thanks, Tomas!)
• New API call: read disk.
• Invoke ONERROR on initrd load failure.

Changes in 3.31:

• The simple menu system (menu.c32 and vesamenu.c32) now support loading more than one configuration file at a time, using MENU INCLUDE or by specifying multiple filenames.
• The MENU COLOR statement can now control the shadowing mode.

Changes in 3.30:

• libcom32 extended to support graphics mode and graphical console.
• vesamenu.c32, new graphical version of the Simple Menu System, see README.menu.
• New com32 modules by Erwan Velu do selection based on CPUID or PCI devices present.
• RPM spec: add syslinux-tftpboot module; move syslinux by default to the /usr/share/syslinux directory.
• RPM spec: extlinux is now a separate package.