[syslinux] Request for enlightenment..

[Ian McDonald]

H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> Ian McDonald wrote:
>> I did kind of wonder if there was a way of getting the kernel to look at 
>> the bios information.
> 
> Nope.  A MEMDISK-on-Linux driver could be written, but there has been
> zero interest so far.  Also, using memdisk to boot Linux is rather silly.

I know it's a wee bit strange, but I was rather taken by the idea of 
being able to just build a small linux install in vmware, make 
modifications to it as a running system, then boot said installation 
trivially using memdisk, having dd'd a copy of the disk (from a pxelinux 
image we use for our deployment system already).

I'll just build a kernel, and use a large initrd as I've done in the 
past, but that has the disadvantage of not being so easily modifiable as 
  a "running" install. What I'm attempting to do is build a small linux 
PXE-able system so I can apply a SAS backplane firmware update to a Dell 
2950 which is running neither Windows, nor Linux. I've used memdisk for 
many moons to punt dos images at servers for updates, but for some 
reason this binary update needs Windows or "RedHat" (and a great list of 
dependencies, which would be more difficult to resolve on a non-running 
system).

> 
>> Aside from the above, I'm still not sure why Lilo fails on memdisk newer 
>> than 3.31.
> 
> I suggest asking the LILO people about that...

I was actually wondering what behaviour had changed between 3.31 and 
3.35 (and later) that had made something that had worked since memdisk 
2.x "suddenly" break.

However, seeing as I'll not be using it much longer...

--
ian