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SubjectRe: 2.3 wish: integrate pcmcia into mainstream kernel
On Wed, Jun 02, 1999 at 03:42:01PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>
> On Wed, 2 Jun 1999, David Hinds wrote:
> >
> > It should not be, if RedHat (or whatever distribution you used) put
> > the ide_cs driver on their PCMCIA install disk.
>
> WHAT install disk?
>
> There is no install disk: it's all on CD-ROM.
>
> If you think I'm going to use a floppy to boot up an operating system
> with, you're wrong. It makes perfect sense to just boot up the kernel, and
> start installation from the CD.
>
> Except it doesn't work unless you can read the CD. Which you can't with
> the current PCMCIA approach.
>
> NOW do you see why I think a user-mode component is simply not acceptable
> for any basic functionality?

If you can boot from this PCMCIA device (which is a platform specific
feature, and not something you should necessarily expect to be able to
do), then you can load an initrd image from it. So the issue reverts
to the distribution maintainers' choice of supported installation
modes. I don't know whose CD you were using, but Red Hat has chosen,
and documented their choice, to support this type of installation
using boot diskettes.

The *only* strong argument I've heard for putting PCMCIA in the kernel
from the standpoint of *functionality* is that in systems that are
severely memory constrained, the overhead of an initrd image can be
unacceptable.

-- Dave Hinds

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