From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "H. Peter Anvin" Subject: Re: Linux mdadm superblock question. Date: Mon, 15 Feb 2010 23:02:03 -0800 Message-ID: <4B7A42EB.3070405@zytor.com> References: <4877c76c1002111752h23e14f7aibe58a89181e6f493@mail.gmail.com> <4B77044B.1020609@zytor.com> <20100216112708.4a863f86@notabene.brown> <4B79F3CE.5030907@zytor.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org To: david@lang.hm Cc: Neil Brown , Michael Evans , Justin Piszcz , linux-raid@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids 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