[syslinux] BIOS disk geometry and Linux 2.6

[Michael_E_Brown at Dell.com]

EDD author == Matt Domsch.  Matt_Domsch at dell.com. 

He is open to suggestions. Unfortunately, he has a new baby and is out for a
few weeks.
--
Michael

-----Original Message-----
From: syslinux-bounces at zytor.com [mailto:syslinux-bounces at zytor.com] On
Behalf Of H. Peter Anvin
Sent: Friday, February 27, 2004 12:02 PM
To: Patrick J. LoPresti
Cc: syslinux at zytor.com
Subject: Re: [syslinux] BIOS disk geometry and Linux 2.6


Patrick J. LoPresti wrote:
> 
> This still does not let you do the mapping in general.  Any drive 
> might have been moved from any machine.

And then you need to install, so you have to make sure this program runs

> Or do you clobber sector 1 on every attached drive?  Seems risky...

That's the idea.

> And don't some boot loaders use sector 1?

None that I know of.  I know someone on this list (Murali?) is 
successfully using it for some installation stuff.

> Just out of curiosity, why is it such a bad idea to pass the geometry 
> as a kernel parameter?

It just doesn't buy you anything.

> I suppose it might be better just to add a field to the EDD data and 
> fill it in from setup.S...  Hm.

I believe this is the right thing to do.

> I still think the geometry issue and the device mapping issue are 
> completely independent and need to be solved separately.
> 
> The geometry issue is critical for me, and it can be solved without 
> any scribbling on the disk just by asking the BIOS a few questions.
> 
> The device mapping issue is harder, but on the other hand it is about 
> 1000 times less important.  Almost all of my users only have one 
> drive; for the rest, I am happy to tell them "use a newer BIOS or 
> choose the boot device manually".  And even without EDD 3, I can take 
> a pretty good guess at the boot device.

Well, what you should do, then, is ask the EDD patch authors to make the 
data available even if it's incomplete.

	-hpa

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