Jeremy Katz wrote:
And if you have a failure to install the bootloader on a lot of other platforms, you end up booting back into the installer also. So s390isn't special here.What you do not see is a failure on reboot. It reboots. The system administrator sees a linux system booting up. It is just not the correct system.Again, this isn't different from other architecturesSo, what issues are we against? The error checking on writing out reipl information? The additional "ipc" to the loader to shutdown on an error?I'm against adding architecture specific codepaths when, realistically, there's no good reason to. This sounds like a case where the behavior on s390 is no different from that of any other platform. And so we should let it follow the code paths that we use everywhere else. And then, if we're concerned about possible (uncommon) errors there, let's add something *COMMON* to handle informing the user about the error rather than one-offs for s390
It's becoming less a problem on intellish hardware these days, as one can commonly interrupt the BIOS and make a one-off choice to boot something different.
I've not seen the problem on Apples or on the Sparcs I've had my hands on.It's a _very_ long time since I had my hands on a mainframe; those with long memories might recall the System/370 range (I played with models 135, 145 and 168) and Facom (Fujitsu) M-series (I had my hands on a M190, which was a little newer). On real hardware, one set a dial (or screen selection) to the boot device, and it stayed on that selection; under VM one might say "IPL 180."
I'm curious as to how the boot loop occurs on the modern zSeries.fwiw I'm subscribed to the Linux-390 hosted by Marist. AFAICS people generally don't use the vendor's install procedure very much, atm they're discussing procedures to clone and customise systems, and some discussion as to whether it's better done in VM or in Linux: the Linux proponent has just said he can have a new system on the network in under a minute.
There are people from RH (Brad Hinson) and Novell subscribed to the list just now.
-- Cheers John -- spambait 1aaaaaaa coco merseine nu Z1aaaaaaa coco merseine nu -- Advice http://webfoot.com/advice/email.top.php http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375 You cannot reply off-list:-)