Re: Use a CD-ROM as root?
Edward,
Its a good idea, except for the assumption that the kernel detects
the cdrom, and therefore, this code could be used for the boot disk. I
have been unable to get any Linux distribution to autodetect my cdrom
drive correctly on my Aptiva S90. See bug report #34934 for more details.
Regards,
Jor-el
On Wed, 31 Mar 1999, Edward Betts wrote:
> A lot of CD-ROMs are now ide, and are hence detected by the kernel. At the
> moment, when we do the first boot we use a combined boot and root disk. Could
> we just put the boot disk bit on the bootable bit of a CD-ROM, so we get the
> full a 1.44Mb kernel (plenty for anyone), and use the CD-ROM as the root disk?
>
> That way there are hardly any size restrictions on the boot disk (1.44Mb is
> plenty) or the root disk (How does 10Mb sound?). We could bloat the whole
> thing as much as we want.
>
> The main considerations have to be, people not installing from CD, people
> using old or SCSI CD drives and the ultimate problem, the name of the cdrom
> drive varies from machine to machine. Mine is /dev/hdc and my friends is
> /dev/hdd.
>
> The kernel detects them so it could be modified to hunt it out and use it to
> boot from, but we would need a kernel guru.
>
> $ dmesg | egrep "(hd|ide)"
> ide: i82371 PIIX (Triton) on PCI bus 0 function 57
> ide0: BM-DMA at 0xf000-0xf007
> ide1: BM-DMA at 0xf008-0xf00f
> hda: FUJITSU MPA3035AT, 3337MB w/0kB Cache, CHS=847/128/63, DMA
> hdc: , ATAPI CDROM drive
> ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
> ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
> hda: hda1 hda2 hda4 < hda5 hda6 hda7 >
>
>
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