Re: Improved aboot (with updated documentation) from boot floppies

[David Huggins-Daines <dhuggins linuxcare com>]

Larry Sendlosky <larry@scrugs.lkg.dec.com> writes:

>   Is Alpha/SRM the only Linux platform that can't boot from DOS
>   partitions? Wouldn't surprise me if it was.

No, Sparc, MIPS, m68k, and some varieties of PowerPC are the same.
Think of it as "being like the other non-Intel architectures" rather
than "deviating from the way it's done on Intel".

DOS partition tables are really brain-damaged (the 32-bit fields in
them are unaligned, extended partitions are a mess, etc), so, except
for the fact that the fdisk support for BSD disklabels as they're done
on Alpha is somewhat broken at the moment, you might consider it a
blessing rather than a curse :)

Unfortunately the 2.2 kernel's default config.in doesn't include BSD
disklabel support (regardless of whether you have selected "Generic"
as your system type or "Use SRM as Bootloader") - this should probably
be changed.

-- 
David Huggins-Daines, Senior Linux Consultant, Linuxcare, Inc.
613.562.1239 tel
dhuggins@linuxcare.com, http://www.linuxcare.com/
Linuxcare. Support for the revolution.