Re: LANANA: To Pending Device Number Registrants

Oliver Neukum
2001-05-15T05:58:43Z

On Tuesday, 15. May 2001 00:54, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> 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.

And happily passes a "root=" argument through "append=" for the kernel to
evaluate.

Regards
Oliver