[syslinux] BIOS disk geometry and Linux 2.6

Patrick J. LoPresti patl at users.sourceforge.net
Fri Feb 27 10:49:01 PST 2004


"H. Peter Anvin" <hpa at zytor.com> writes:

> > 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.

Sure it does; it gives you the geometry of the boot device.

The mapping problem is a red herring.  Every single one of the
millions of machines with GRUB or LILO in the MBR already solved the
mapping problem.  Every time anybody has ever installed RedHat, they
have solved the mapping problem.

Solving this problem without user interaction for every corner case is
hard.  But as millions of Linux installations prove, it is really not
that important.  You can guess the boot disk correctly in the
overwhelming majority of cases.

> > 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.

OK, I will take a look at this.  If it turns out to be annoying, I
will fall back on my com32 plan (which fixes the problem for me but
not anybody else).

 - Pat




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