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/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Jan 15 2003 - 22:00:37 EST