>>>>> "Manuel" == Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.lip6.fr> writes:
    Manuel> On Jan 29, mcr@solidum.com wrote
    >>  Hmm. I have a 10Gb drive with Linux on it. It worked fine on a K6/266
    >> ATX system, but was intended to go on our fileserver, a K6/200 AT
    >> system. The AT system definitely got 19k/16/63 as parameters, and this
    >> royally messed up LILO. The ATX system got the same things and it
    >> didn't care.... so there is some kind of support in newer BIOSes for
    >> larger disks. I don't quite get it.  What pissed me off, and resulting
    >> n us leaving a 3Gb disk in as the boot disk was that even if I told
    >> the BIOS that I had 1024/63/256 (instead of 1244/63/256) that it still
    >> didn't work. No... that's wrong. What really pissed me off was the way
    >> that LILO works.

    Manuel> Did the ATX system use 63/256 too ?  Did you use the same
    Manuel> 'NORMAL/LBA/LARGE' option on both systems ?

  Yes, identical. I'm pretty sure that I had the same LBA/LARGE/NORMAL.
One source of frustration is that the "auto" option would pick different
values.

    >> I sure want to teach libsa about ext2fs and make it able to load Linux
    >> kernels. That would also make upgrading our server to NetBSD much
    >> easier.

    Manuel> ext2fs in libsa should be quite easy. The problem is actually to
    Manuel> pass to the linux kernel all the fancy options you can set in
    Manuel> lilo.  Our boot blocks only undertand a few one-letter options,
    Manuel> and you can't assign a value to them.

  I would have the libsa read a file, i.e. /etc/bootdefault (a la BSDi)
or maybe even /etc/lilo.conf to get that junk. Yes, agreed... getting it
to start up the kernel properly will be a challenge, but lilo is open
source as well, so I read its code. 
  I would start by getting lilo to load our /boot that has ext2fs support
in it. 

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