FC4t2 no good without LILO

Peter Jones pjones at redhat.com
Tue Apr 12 20:33:24 UTC 2005


On Tue, 2005-04-12 at 13:05 -0700, Dana Lacoste wrote:
> > > Here's a question -- does grub work yet if your boot device is >2TB?
> > 
> > Yes, no, and maybe.  It depends on how you partition, and we don't yet
> > do GPT partitioning; that's an installer bug and an fdisk/parted bug as
> > much as anything else.  Somebody's been threatening to send me a box to
> > use to fix it, but nothing has shown up yet.  I'll start coding it blind
> > at some point, I guess...
> 
> OK, let me get this straight.
> 
> "Some people can't use this at all, it doesn't work at all for them, but
> because it works for me they have to use what I use, like it or lump it."

Please try to take the context into account.    This isn't even a
problem which is specific to grub, AFAIK.  If disks larger than 2TB are
set up according to the standard -- which we'll have to use to if we
want the OS to support partitioning on such a large device -- then I
think LILO will be in just as bad of shape.  I can't say I've thoroughly
investigated LILO's chances in this scenario, but it would be incredibly
surprising if it actually works as one might naively expect.

I'm sorry if you think 3TB disks should be a priority right now, and I'd
love to have them work fine, but that's just not realistic at this point
in time.

[tangential comment skipped ]
> So there's no way to install with some systems because it messes up
> the partition table.

No, it's not that it "messes up the partition table".  You *can't* have
a traditional partition table which is valid if any partition is to
include sectors outside of the first 2 terabytes on the device.  Full
stop.

> And there's no way to install with other systems cuz it won't boot after
> cuz grub just plain doesn't work.

Which I'm not opposed to fixing in any way, but posts like those in this
thread aren't even trying to address these issues -- although there is a
constant hinting of some widespread, well known, well understood issue
which is simply being ignored.  So again -- if it exists, make sure it's
in bugzilla.  If it doesn't, then keep in mind that claiming otherwise
in such an utterly hostile way isn't a good way to make friends.

> And the Fedora team is going to fix these problems by eliminating the
> tools that do work?

Do you have examples where lilo is known to work and grub currently
doesn't?  Care to elaborate on them, so I can have some hope of having
something working in those cases?

-- 
        Peter




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