Re: Linux mdadm superblock question.

["H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>]

On 02/15/2010 07:18 PM, david@lang.hm wrote:
> On Mon, 15 Feb 2010, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>
>> On 02/15/2010 04:27 PM, Neil Brown wrote:
>>
>> There are three options:
>>
>> a) either don't boot from it (separate /boot);
>> b) use a bootloader which installs in the MBR and
>> hopefully-unpartitioned disk areas (e.g. Grub);
>> c) use a nonstandard custom MBR.
>>
>> Neither (b) or (c), of course, allow for chainloading from another OS
>> install and thus are bad for interoperability.
>
> I have had no problems with XFS partitions and lilo as the bootloader.
> I've been doing this for a couple of years now without realizing that
> there is supposed to be a problem.
>

LILO also can be stuffed in the MBR (and then uses block-pointers from 
there).  There is one more option that I didn't mention, which is to put 
the bootloader of a separate partition, OS/2 style.  Again, breaks the 
standard chainloading model.

	-hpa