[Gllug] Problem with encrypted Debian root.

Nix nix at esperi.org.uk
Wed Jul 21 22:52:24 UTC 2010


On 21 Jul 2010, Matthew King stated:

> Nix <nix at esperi.org.uk> writes:
>
>>> Not to mention that the position on the bus, which the OS uses, is ignored.
>>
>> *scream*
>>
>> (hang on, *ignored*? so, er, how do they number the disks? black magic?
>> random? BIOS ordering?)
>
> OK, not ignored as such, but not much attention is paid. For one thing
> the BIOS is capable of swapping devices around and I've no idea what
> grub does in that case. Probably something ugly.

That's basically the same as every single bootloader ever, then. *All*
of them (other than WinNT's) use BIOS routines from start to end. (NT's
is ludicrously overdesigned and amounts to a small OS itself. Even it
uses the BIOS to load the second-stage loader, because you can't fit
a device driver into 400-odd bytes! And of course you must trust its
ordering if you use it.)

> In many cases it's simply the fact that it's there which means I've
> rebooted and relied on grub's interactivity rather than update menu.lst
> and *then* rebooted.

Aha, right. I long ago automated updating lilo.conf and rerunning lilo,
so I don't notice that anymore. :)
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