From: Mikael Pettersson <mikpe@csd.uu.se>
To: hpa@zytor.com, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: Killing off the boot sector (was: [STATUS 2.5] January 8, 2002)
Date: Sat, 11 Jan 2003 17:03:51 +0100 (MET) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <200301111603.RAA06278@harpo.it.uu.se> (raw)
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
next reply other threads:[~2003-01-11 15:55 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 6+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2003-01-11 16:03 Mikael Pettersson [this message]
2003-01-22 7:24 ` H. Peter Anvin
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2003-01-08 18:05 [STATUS 2.5] January 8, 2002 Guillaume Boissiere
2003-01-08 20:03 ` Killing off the boot sector (was: [STATUS 2.5] January 8, 2002) H. Peter Anvin
2003-01-08 20:35 ` DervishD
2003-01-08 21:23 ` John Bradford
2003-01-09 0:06 ` H. Peter Anvin
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