I found that your patch applied cleanly after the IBM patches (to the 2.4.19 kernel source tree). My automation applies patches in order based on their timestamp (which thankfully is preserved because IBM delivers them in TAR). This is so clean that I would hate for IBM to miss the opportunity.
Only addition that it needs is LOADPARM, but that is a very different mechanism. It just seems that it fits with the support of PARM operationally. > > We've argued also about the order of the parameters. ... > My guess is that appending would be quite satisfactory, > but it won't be difficult to allow both prefixing and suffixing. I don't know what pain Rob & co have gone through, but my experience is that you want *override* of on-disk defaults, which seems to be effected by appending the additional PARMs. That is, the on-disk parm says root=/dev/dasdb1 and you would override that with 'ipl 1234 clear parm root=/dev/dasdc1'. The appending of the VM PARMs gives the desired result. In PC land too, "append" seems to be what is happening. But I have not had occasion to dissect LILO or GRUB to know for sure. It is possible that a boot loader would try to replace on-disk tokens with interactively entered boot parms, but that seems like a lot of work if the kernel is already doing the Right Thing with override. -- RMT
