Syslinux

Storage media on embedded systems often come with a msdos filesystem on the media (e.g. DOC,CF), so for systems that want to use this msdos filesystem directly for booting a Linux bootloader called syslinux is available that will allow booting from FAT12 partitions. Syslinux has some nice features that come along with it:

• easy to configure for multi-boot systems via syslinux.cfg (ascii text file)
• allows assigning the function keys to text-files to present additional boot-time information for the user.
• simple to install with the syslinux command from Linux (the actual boot-loader is ldlinux.sys a DOS program)
• allows passing a kernel command-line at the boot prompt
• allows a specified boot-delay (time-out in syslinux.cfg) for auto-boot.

Syslinux was originally used quite heavily for Linux install/boot-floppies. It is still supported and is available on almost all common Linux distributions. With the time-out set to 0 the system will boot immediately, not allowing the user to pass any parameters (but in this setup you also have no access to the help-screens). A disadvantage of syslinux is that the default boot-image is statically set in syslinux.cfg on the FAT12 boot-media, which means that if a boot fails you need qualified intervention (a simply power-cycling will not do), and you need a local console with a keyboard !

A further disadvantage of syslinux is that the FAT12 boot-medium is quite limited with respect to file-names and permissions. These limitations need to be considered for systems with high security demands.