On Sun, 2005-09-11 at 13:34, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
On Sun, 2005-09-11 at 13:06 -0500, Les Mikesell wrote:
He's talking about finding the root partition here. At that point you have the kernel and initrd loaded and no longer need bios. Assume you have /boot on a partition that bios understands and want to be able to arbitrarily move the drive that holds the / partition around. Won't labels, LVM identifiers and even md devices be found and assembled correctly from anywhere at this stage?
If the disk order does not change in the BIOS, yes. But if the disk order changes in the BIOS, no. That's typically the problem.
In reality, it's _also_ a problem for NT-based Windows too. Many people have only used DOS-based (9x/Me) Windows which can use BIOS Disk Services (aka "Using Compatibility Mode").
Why should the kernel/initrd-loaded stage care anything at all about bios when finding the root partition? /boot has to be found by bios, of course, but I'm pretty sure I've put / partitions on drives with no bios access at all that nothing knows about until the kernel is loaded and probes for them.