Followup to: <20000710202107.A13852@nemesis.ncsl.nist.gov>
By author: Olivier Galibert <galibert@pobox.com>
In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>
> On Mon, Jul 10, 2000 at 03:31:12PM -0700, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> > I see. Yes, Genesis writes to /dev/hda1, and if GRUB is writing to
> > /dev/hda then I would agree 100% that GRUB is buggy.
>
> Why buggy? Grub knows about decoding partition tables and filesystems
> (that's a killer feature for me), so why should it rely on the kernel
> for that? I'd say that the kernel is buggy by having writes to
> /dev/hda not being identical to writes to /dev/hda1 with an
> appropriate offset. This violates the principle of least surprise
> btw, there is only one physical device in there, and for no good
> reason.
>
Yes, for a good reason: performance.
You should rely on the kernel for it because you're playing on the
kernel's turf by messing with a mounted filesystem, and gets to play
by the kernel's rules.
-hpa
-- <hpa@transmeta.com> at work, <hpa@zytor.com> in private! "Unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot." http://www.zytor.com/~hpa/puzzle.txt- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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