New booter

[Ethan Benson]

On 15/9/99 Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:

> >From Apple perspective, it's not a kludge since the final MacOS X will
>boot from HFS+ partitions, so it seems logical to have the bootinfo on an
>HFS volume.

well regardless its still a kludge from the linux perspective we 
don't use HFS..

and besides that its my opinion that relying on a specific filesystem 
to boot your OS is extremely shortsighted, if later on they want to 
change there filesystem to something better they can't since there 
bootfile would not be readable on this new fs, they are then chained 
to HFS+ forever and end up using kludgy crap like hidden HFS 
filesystems with the boot files. (and besides this not everyone who 
wants to use OSX wants to use HFS)

IMNSHO the only way to boot an OS is to have your firmware load 
whatever is on the disk bootblock which contains the OS loader.  no 
need to bloat the firmware with filesystem code that will inevitably 
become obsolete and useless, and you are no longer chained to your 
current filesystem for all eternity... I have to say that intel 
hardware is far superior to PPC hardware in this respect, booting 
arbitrary OSes independently on intel hw is a complete non issue...

anyway regardless of what apple is doing linux is a different OS it 
does not use HFS and as such using a small useless HFS partition just 
to boot it is a kludge.



Ethan Benson
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