From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue May 21 14:14:29 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) id OAA00173 for hackers-outgoing; Tue, 21 May 1996 14:14:29 -0700 (PDT) Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.211]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.3/8.7.3) with SMTP id OAA00167 for ; Tue, 21 May 1996 14:14:26 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id OAA02038; Tue, 21 May 1996 14:09:38 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199605212109.OAA02038@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: Glitch in install procedure. To: bde@zeta.org.au (Bruce Evans) Date: Tue, 21 May 1996 14:09:38 -0700 (MST) Cc: dutchman@spase.nl, terry@lambert.org, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: <199605210547.PAA23269@godzilla.zeta.org.au> from "Bruce Evans" at May 21, 96 03:47:06 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > >That's because it couldn't ask BIOS to tell it what was good. > > Actually, it's because it couldn't ask ufs for where the blocks in /kernel > are. It knows what the BIOS geometry is supposed to be since it just > created a partition table that usually won't work unless you told it the > BIOS geometry. It can ask. The BIOS won't tell it because the BIOS will stop at 1024 cylinders because the BIOS doesn't use sector addressing like it should. > >Silly FreeBSD, trusted you to know what you were doing. 8-). > > It's a feature that you can write /kernel on a file system whose partition > has BIOS cylinders >= 1024. Silly BSD allows writing to such file systems > :-). (Except possibly at install time, there is nothing special about > /kernel.). There's no problem there. The bug there is the BIOS boot code, the *limitied* second stage boo blocks, and the *limited* INT 13 interface the second stage boot blocks use (just like the BIOS boot blocks, just like the BIOS POST). It's a BIOS limitation, not a BSD limitation; it's not very surprising (to me anyway) that BSD doesn't see the limit on the install. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.