[LI] Re: Defragmenting an ext2 FS, was >> Boot loaders Any advantage <<

[C Hanish Menon <hanish@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 Arun Wrote
> multilevel bootloader.

Is there any advantage, I mean significant advantage and which can't be
achieved thro lilo.

> 
> I don't see this as a particular advantage. What percentage of 
> Linux installs boot from a fs other than ext2fs ? In such cases,
> there'll always be an alternate route - things like loadlin.
> 

Well the other OS neednot be Dos/Windows always. Also doesn't lilo do its job
well enough and work with almost any OS and filesystem.

> 
> This is not a constraint. LILO doesn't need /boot/vmlinuz to be unfragmented.
> When you run /sbin/lilo, it queries the filesystem for a map of /boot/vmlinuz
> and stores the actual fragmented map (list of disk blocks that make up
> vmlinuz) of /boot/vmlinuz in /boot/map.
> 

Well thats what I had in mind, but I was lazy enough to checkout the lilo
source. However thanks for explaining what lilo does.

> 
> This requires that the filesystem should implement an interface, that allows
> a user program to query the "map" of a file on the disk. A bloat, I don't
> want in memory at run time, because no one else uses it. In other words,
> LILO can't boot from a filesystem that doesn't implement the above interface.
> 

Any fs driver already has the logic to  identify the DiskBlocks assoicated
with a file from the inode(unix) or the FAT (dos/windows). So this
additional interface which inturn could use the already existing logic
shouldn't actual occupy a lot of memory.  

Or 

inturn lilo in itself COULD identify the Blocks using the inode or fat or
whatever, then lilo should understand the fs logic for the fs's it
supports. This should also be not a problem as lilo requires root access if I
am not wrong. 

Well either of these schemes is not a bad idea given that it will allow
BootLoading from any FS.

---------
Keep :-)
HanishKVC

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