On Wed, 13 Jun 2018 00:58:09 -0400 Michael Shell <li...@michaelshell.org> wrote:
> IMHO, lilo had one particularly awful design decision and the resulting > unexpected behavior was never explained to us as it should have been - > lilo would *reinterpret* whatever the user specified for root= in terms > of device numbers of the current running system and then pass the > resulting device *number* as the value of root= to the kernel to be > booted. FWIW, there once ago was a valid reason for doing this - a long time ago, kernels only recognized major/minor device numbers for root directory specifiers: root=0x803 However, at some point kernels became able to recognize (at least the common) /dev forms (e.g., root=/dev/sda3) and convert that at boot to the major/minor form used internally even though there was not yet a functioning /dev directory. In any case, the lilo man page should have done a better job explaining what exactly was actually passed to the kernel for root= in the lilo.conf. Mike -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/lfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page Do not top post on this list. A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style
