Ronald G Minnich <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > On Fri, 15 Mar 2002, ollie wrote: > > > I think it is a good trade off to add filesystem support. The #3 of > > your proposal is just too "hard-coded" which I really don't like. > > I think I agree with Ollie. If we're adding ethernet and IDE to a > stand-alone booter, file systems don't grow it enough to care. And we MUST > support people who want to load Linux from CDs. That requires ISOFS at > minimum.
I agree that filesystems are not evil... But for general purpose block devices a solution that does not require filesystem or partition table parsing should take less code, and require less maintenace in the long run.. Combined with having the most flexibility. cds, and nics are definitely not block devices so they should play by slightly different rules. On block devices if we interoperate with other operating systems firmware on the same system we have to work with. BSD partition lables (alpha) PC partition tables (x86) EFI partitions tables (ia64) And possibly other weird things on embedded systems. The giant variety of things people have done and are doing on block devices is why I am reluctant to suppport filesystem parsing code as the default. In firmware that we need to keep small. At the same time I really like the idea of making a super grub with the Linux Kernel that supports everything under the sun. I just don't think I can flash it into my ROM chip :) Eric
