Re: Linux-2.1.92 - Feature Freeze

david parsons (o.r.c@p.e.l.l.p.o.r.t.l.a.n.d.o.r.u.s)
4 Apr 1998 17:17:36 -0800


In article <linux.kernel.6g4c2r$jii$1@palladium.transmeta.com>,
H. Peter Anvin <hpa@transmeta.com> wrote:
>Followup to: <Pine.LNX.3.96.980403225030.22074A-100000@nightshade.ml.org>
>By author: <linker@nightshade.ml.org>
>In newsgroup: linux.dev.kernel
>>
>> People need enough PnP to be able to boot from a PNP ISA device without
>> relying on initrd tricks. (Yes, ISA PNP is both an abomination and an
>> oxy moron)
>>
>
>Why is that? initrd is an excellent and very general mechanism.
>There seems to be a lot of resistance to using it;

I suspect a lot of that is because of the documentation for it.

I do what is basically an initrd as part of the Mastodon
distribution, but instead of setting up an initrd, I just do all the
steps by hand and leave the user with a system that contains a 1.4mb
black hole that used to contain the ramdisk.

I've looked at the documentation in Documentation/initrd.txt, but
then my head starts hurting and I start looking around for a way to
do BIOS floppy access instead. I admit that it just may be that
I'm old and resistant to change (libc 5.0.9, anyone?), but I have
been working on Unix systems for over 20 years now and, if the
documentation is too esoteric for me, it may be too esoteric for
other people as well.

____
david parsons \bi/ Old, in computer years.
\/

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