Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 10 Nov 2004 09:35:34 -0600 | From | Matt Domsch <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH][RFC] Add boot sector checksums to EDD |
| |
On Wed, Nov 10, 2004 at 06:49:28AM +0100, Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote: > Michael E Brown schrieb:
(copying lkml again)
> > I'm curious, do you have a tool that uses the boot sector checksum? I > > can think of a couple of places it could be useful, but all of my > > use-cases are adequately covered by simple signature. > > The tool is SUSE hwinfo. Currently its author does the checksumming > in the bootloader which kills some BIOSes (1st EDD request in the > bootloader is ok, second request by kernel EDD startup code hangs > the machine).
I'd be curious to understand this better. i.e. failure mode, why it fails, for what systems, etc.
> I have some drives with identical mbr_signature (drives were wiped > with dd before I got them). Using a checksum gives me at least some > chance to identify them better because one has a bootloader, the > other hasn't, they have different partition tables etc.
What wrote the bootloader to the first disk? Can *that* write a unique signature into the disk? Red Hat's build of parted includes a patch I wrote (not yet included in parted upstream IIRC) which has parted write a unique signature to each disk, so that's how we solve it there...
Thanks, Matt
-- Matt Domsch Sr. Software Engineer, Lead Engineer Dell Linux Solutions linux.dell.com & www.dell.com/linux Linux on Dell mailing lists @ http://lists.us.dell.com - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
| |