On Sat, 6 Nov 1999, OKUJI Yoshinori wrote :
> Probably GRUB now can distinguish IDE from SCSI, so the question is
> related to the user interface rather than the internals. Suppose that
> the user uses the blocklist syntax. In the native syntax, she will
> write like this:
>
> (hd1)1+20
>
> But she cannot write it correctly just by this:
>
> /dev/hd11+20
>
> Because the slice syntax is not terminated explicitly. To solve this
> problem, GRUB must requires a separator like this:
>
I had written the syntax translation modifications to the
disk_io.c file, and some very minor modification to this syntax will make
this work. What I had left out was the IDE and SCSI detection, because I
had no idea how to go about it. Then I had suggested IRQ probing, and
the "ioprobe" is quite similar to it. Now we have "ioprobe", so we can
implement it cleanly, including cleaner CD-ROM detection.
> /dev/hd1,1+20
>
> However, it is not so easy to solve this problem in the completion
> support code. And, the real problem is that probably we cannot support
> the completion both for the native syntax and for the slice syntax.
>
I had supported the completion syntax, with the only exception
that even the filenames had to be preceeded with the "/dev/"hdXsX" prefix,
and this is quite rational. The support for the "install" command was
also complete. Right now I am using my own BSD syntax support to boot
RedHat, Debian, Hurd, Win95, Minix and FreeBSD-3.0, and the code has never
crashed. If you want to look at the code, I can send it to you again.
Ashutosh Rajekar
http://i.am/asr
