Re: beta 2 update
--- Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net> wrote:
> James J. Ramsey wrote:
> > I tested the Jan 3rd i386 netinst iso. It still
> > doesn't work with older ATAPI CD-ROMs that can't
> > handle DMA, since 1) the standard kernel parameter
> > ide=nodma gets mysteriously ignored by the
> installer,
>
> There is nothing mysterious about it. Read the
> module HOWTO.
Ah, I see. You mean here
<http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Module-HOWTO/parm.html>:
"We've seen above that you pass parameters to an LKM
by specifying something like io=0x300 on the insmod
command. For a module that is bound into the base
kernel, you pass parameters to it via the kernel boot
parameters."
So the installer *isn't* doing something goofy. That's
good.
> > and 2) AFAIK, not all motherboard BIOS allow the
> > disabling of DMA.
> >
> > I don't know if you consider that badly wrong or
> not.
>
> Not really, this is a minor issue that affects a
> minority of old
> machines and can be worked around.
This minority of machines is still big enough that Red
Hat, SUSE, and, interestingly enough, Knoppix still do
workarounds to handle them, just in case--and Debian
is more likely to be installed on that minority of
machines, since they are usually low-end machines on
which Debian is still designed to work.
> It's nothing to
> delay the beta for.
Maybe not, but it *should* be on a TODO list of stuff
to take care of.
> If you really
> need to get this to
> work, you should be able to boot in expert mode and
> enter the nodma
> parameter when it loads the appropriate ide module.
The documentation on expert mode in the
INSTALLATION-HOWTO is a little thin, but you *seem* to
be saying that just to turn off DMA for the CD-ROM, I
have resort to avoid using Debian's hardware detection
and load the modules manually with modconf. I *hope*
you aren't saying that.
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