Messages in this thread | | | From | BROWN Nick <> | Subject | RE: The WHY's (RE: ide drive w/dma ... system crash) | Date | Wed, 12 May 1999 13:44:24 +0200 |
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<snip> >next come with new versions of LILO and fdisk that use the new >interface, next wait for five years to make sure no old LILO's >are around, and only then remove the present probe_cmos_for_drives(). >And there will be screams five years from now, just like today >we hear people that still use 1993 ZMAGIC binaries.
I think this is probably a bit pessimistic. The number of programs involved is rather small: fdisk (I'm sure you can fix that :-) ), LILO, and the other loaders - plus perhaps one or two disk utilities. And all the loaders are going to start creaking as more and more people get 18 GB drives with Windows 98 pre-installed, and want to put Linux at the end, past the 8.4 GB boundary.
If there is to be a central repository for "how to convert disk geometry to BIOS geometry", it should be outside the kernel. Perhaps even a library with an API would be possible. Dan could maintain the blacklist^Wroutine which checks BIOS IDs for known incompatibilities :-)
An even simpler alternative, at least to work around the LILO problems for disks set up with DOS etc, might be a small tool which reads the MBR and determines what the current CHS values are - then tells the user, "reboot with these on the boot command line, add them to lilo.conf, and off you go". After all, specifying hda=c,h,s is a more or less universal fix - I didn't like the idea of having to do this at first, but now it's in my lilo.conf, I'm just fine. This could probably go into the LILO HOWTO, or the release notes of the various Linux distributions. A half-decent distribution install program should be able to run this utility during setup and fill in the numbers automagically.
I guess it's bad form to create work for the maintainers of other programs, but it's a fact of life: the kernel does not exist in a vacuum. It should try to provide services (eg, all the BIOS disk value that might be (genuinely) required), but can't try to solve everybody's compatibility problems.
Nick Brown, Strasbourg, France (Nick(dot)Brown(at)coe(dot)int)
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