Re: LANANA: To Pending Device Number Registrants

H. Peter Anvin
2001-05-14T22:55:26Z

Alexander Viro wrote:
>
> On Mon, 14 May 2001, Alan Cox wrote:
>
> > > > Except that Linus wont hand out major numbers, which means I can't even boot
> > > > simply off such a device. I bet the vendors in question dont think the sun
> > > > shines out of linus backside any more.
> > >
> > > Not really. Special-casing for mounting root is trivially solvable. BTDT,
> > > and you've reviewed the patch.
> >
> > And lilo ?
>
> LILO uses BIOS, for fsck sake. It couldn't care less for device numbers
> on the kernel side. Ask Andries how much do they have in common with
> BIOS drive numbers.
>

That's not the issue. LILO takes whatever you pass to root= and converts
it to a device number at /sbin/lilo time. An idiotic practice on the
part of LILO, in my opinion, that ought to have been fixed a long time
ago.

-hpa

--
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