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)
__________________________________________________________
email address updates : @coe.int replaces @coe.fr
for more information, http://dct.coe.int/info/emfci001.htm
__________________________________________________________
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/