Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sat, 11 Jan 2003 17:03:51 +0100 (MET) | From | Mikael Pettersson <> | Subject | Re: Killing off the boot sector (was: [STATUS 2.5] January 8, 2002) |
| |
On 8 Jan 2003 12:03:27 -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote: >Can we *please* kill off the stupid in-kernel boot sector? The >probing method it uses to determine geometry is unreliable (doesn't >work on anything but true legacy floppies, not IDE, not USB, not >firewire); it generates these kinds of requests; doesn't handle >large-size kernels; hard-codes the use of address 0x90000 which isn't >available on all machines; and overall promotes what's fundamentally >bad practice. > >People keep asking what's the harm in keeping it, and the answer is, >quite simply: "because people continue to try to use it."
While I have no particular affection for the in-kernel boot loader, I do care about being able to test new kernels with 'make bzdisk' as a regular user, using raw (no file system) floppies.
Last time I checked, LILO required both a file system and root privs (for FIBMAP). Would syslinux work better?
/Mikael - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |