Re: The lilo problem
On 2000-05-19 at 23:31 +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> On Fri, 19 May 2000, Mike Bilow wrote:
>
> >...
> > I personally cannot think of any logical reason why it is desirable to
> > have a zImage instead of a bzImage kernel, unless the machine is broken.
> > (Remember that Lilo itself is specific to the i386 platform.) Note that
> > LARGE_EBDA was selected to fix a number of important bugs (e.g., 58602) on
> > certain platforms.
> >...
>
> What about backwards compatibility? I have at about 15 different kernels
> (e.g. older versions to compare in case of bugs) that are zImage because
> there was no good reason to make them bzImage. At the moment I can't
> install a kernel (that is already compiled) without
>
> - deleting all the other kernel images
> or
> - recompiling all the other kernel images
> or
> - installing the slink version of lilo
>
>
> If this bug isn't fixed I'll choose the third possibility, but I would be
> absolutely dissatisfied with it.
There really are no perfect solutions. I suggest that, if someone really
needs this, then the proper thing to do is to make the LARGE_EBDA facility
either a command line option or a lilo.conf option. Both of these would
require an upstream change. This is probably not too hard to write and
provide a complete diff to the upstream maintainer, come to think of it.
However, I would be adamant that the Debian Lilo binary at least have
LARGE_EBDA capability, or lots of important stuff (like SMP) will break.
Perhaps Lilo should default to LARGE_EBDA disabled if on non-SMP and
enabled if on SMP?
I'll offer to take a look at doing these patches if Vincent prefers. The
last thing I want to see is something as simple as Lilo holding up Potato.
-- Mike
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