syslinux as an official bootloader option?

[Matthew Miller]

Syslinux can boot from ext4 or btrfs, and has preliminary support for uefi.
It has a simple config format, and is tiny with minimal dependencies. (It
adds about 3.9M on-disk to our F18 cloud image, while grub2 requires 32M.)
We've had it in Fedora for over a decade, and it's gotten lots of testing as
part of the installer. There's even support for automatically updating the
config in grubby, although that may need a little more work.

And did I mention the simple config format?

Grub2 certainly offers more features, and there's going to be use cases
syslinux can't cover. (For lab machines where a bootloader password is
required, for example, I don't think syslinux would work.) But for many
cases (like, but not limited to, the cloud image) syslinux might be a
better fit. I notice that from the Grub2 feature page that the "benefit to
Fedora" isn't anything particulary great about grub2, but simply that legacy
grub is dead.

What about making this an optional bootloader in F19 (in kickstart and via a
hidden option)?



-- 
Matthew Miller  ☁☁☁  Fedora Cloud Architect  ☁☁☁  <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>