Re: Killing off the boot sector (was: [STATUS 2.5] January 8, 2002)

[Mikael Pettersson]

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