Messages in this thread | | | Date | Fri, 05 May 2006 14:48:04 -0700 | From | John Coffman <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH][TAKE 4] THE LINUX/I386 BOOT PROTOCOL - Breaking the 256 limit |
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At 11:17 AM Friday 5/5/2006, you wrote: >John Coffman wrote: >The problem isn't that LILO can't handle more than some number of >characters; that's a LILO issue and doesn't affect the kernel. > >The problem is that some people have reported that the kernel >crashes if booted with LILO and the size limit is more than >255. They haven't so far commented on how they observed that, and >that's a major problem.
Just re-compiling LILO with the COMMAND_LINE_SIZE parameter changed from 256 to 512 will not work. A .bss area must be moved to avoid clobbering the kernel header.
>If the issue is that LILO doesn't null-terminate overlong command >lines, then that's pretty easy to deal with: > >- If the kernel sees protocol version <= 2.01, limit is 255+null. >- If the kernel sees protocol version >= 2.02, but ID is 0x1X, limit >is 255+null. >- Otherwise limit is higher. > >When LILO is fixed, it has to bump the ID byte version number. > >What ID byte values has LILO used?
For the last 8 years LILO has used 0x02 as the loader ID.
If anyone wishes to test a version of LILO that is able to pass a 512 byte command line, then the "22.7.2-beta8" version in the "beta" directory should be tried. It moves the offending ".bss" area to avoid the header clobber. However, I have not yet changed the loader ID.
--John
PGP KeyID: 6781C9C8 (good until 31-Dec-2008) Keyserver at ldap://keyserver.pgp.com OR http://pgp.mit.edu LILO links at http://freshmeat.net/projects/lilo and Help link at http://lilo.go.dyndns.org
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