Re: [Jeff Garzik <address@hidden>] Re: ack! grub bug...

[Christoph Plattner]

Hello, 

        the solution for such problems it to add token replacing
are variables in GRUB, like
        $MEM, $IP, $SERVER_IP, etc, etc,...

So the user can decide himeself using kernel paramters, like

        kernel /boot/vmlinuz mem=$MEM root=/dev/hda2

etc.... If there is enough information, also things like NFSROOT
and IP configuration can be setup.

These variables ('$MEM', etc..) should be usable in all builtin
command.

Cheers
        Christoph P.


OKUJI Yoshinori wrote:
> 
> From: Pixel <address@hidden>
> Subject: [Jeff Garzik <address@hidden>] Re: ack! grub bug...
> Date: Wed, 21 Feb 2001 23:40:39 +0100 (CET)
> 
> > It works around a kernel bug.  That is wrong in and of itself.
> > A kernel bug fix belongs in the kernel, not in grub.
> 
> You're just talking about an utopia. Because Linux was (is?) poor at
> memory detection, people wanted GRUB instead of Linux to probe memory.
> IMO, most of the code of any boot loader is wasted for workarounds,
> because of stupid kernels, buggy BIOSes, and so on...
> 
> > Newer machines have several regions of reserved memory outside and
> > inside these regions.  grub's actions are suicide on newer laptops,
> > and machines like servers with lots of memory.  Laptops have special
> > sections of memory above 1MB which must be reserved... Ditto for
> > ACPI tables.  Using mem=XXX completely eliminates any information
> > that the BIOS has provided to the OS.
> 
> That looks like a failure in Linux's kernel parameter scheme. The mem=
> option was designed for older PC architectures, so the real evil is
> the option itself. In fact, if you want to limit the size of memory
> used by Linux, you need to specify the option anyway, and Linux will
> hang up. This means that the problem is in Linux rather than in GRUB.
> 
> > Grub cannot do this on kernel 2.4, and probably should not do it on
> > kernel 2.2.  I must check for kernel 2.2... I think the 2.2 bug is
> > fixed.  Definitely not for 2.4.  It makes the kernel unstable to do so.
> 
> And, the Linux bootstrap interface never provide the version number of
> the kernel itself, so GRUB can do nothing, whether you use Linux 2.2,
> 2.4, or 2.0. Note that Linux 2.0.x and older Linux 2.2.x are still in
> use, so we shouldn't disable the automatic passing of the mem= option.
> 
> IMO, that problem should be fixed in Linux rather than GRUB. And, the
> command "kernel" supports the option `--no-mem-option' so that you can
> specify that GRUB shoulnd't pass the mem= option automatically,
> anyway. *sigh*
> 
> Okuji
> 
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