[737] in linux-scsi channel archive
Boot Kernels
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Leonard N. Zubkoff)
Wed Nov 1 04:35:34 1995
Date: Tue, 31 Oct 1995 16:25:43 -0800
From: "Leonard N. Zubkoff" <lnz@dandelion.com>
To: linux-scsi@vger.rutgers.edu
As far as I understand it, it's not possible to provide any kernel command line
options when booting off floppy to install a system. If I am incorrect in
this, someone please correct me.
The issue I'm looking to address is the following. By default, my new BusLogic
driver will have it's performance features enabled, such as tagged queuing and
multiple outstanding commands per logical unit, but command line options will
allow control over these features as necessary to compensate for buggy hardware
or poorly configured SCSI systems. However, it would be nice to also give
folks with buggy or poorly configured hardware the possibility of installing
successfully. Once their system is installed, they can use kernel command line
options to turn off tagged queuing if necessary, or to reduce the concurrency,
but I don't see a way to do this during installation from boot floppy.
Since a large number of users will never build custom kernels, I am unwilling
to cripple the standard driver to support broken hardware, nor do I really
expect builders of installation boot kernels to build them specially. One
possibility I have considered is to disable performance features whenever
booting an installation kernel (i.e. root = floppy and ramdisk exists), but
this really feels like a kludge.
Does anyone have any better ideas for how to handle this? Should I even be
worrying about it?
Leonard
