MIME-Version: 1.0
In-Reply-To: <20151227040918.1f1d3b5b@lwn.net>
References: <1450587436-14034-1-git-send-email-diego.viola@gmail.com>
	<20151227040918.1f1d3b5b@lwn.net>
Date: Sun, 27 Dec 2015 17:26:59 -0200
Message-ID: <CA+ToGPH-XYTZTbpWhGQ6gEVzRq6QhJeGsH7oCvyuf6jehE9Puw@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [PATCH] README: remove LILO
From: Diego Viola <diego.viola@gmail.com>
To: Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, trivial@kernel.org
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org
Content-Length: 2280
Lines: 63

Hi Jonathan,

On Sun, Dec 27, 2015 at 9:09 AM, Jonathan Corbet <corbet@lwn.net> wrote:
> On Sun, 20 Dec 2015 02:57:16 -0200
> Diego Viola <diego.viola@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Remove LILO from the README in order to keep the booting section
>> agnostic.  LILO development has also officially stopped.
>
> I know I mentioned LILO before, but LILO is really a symptom of the problem
> here and not the problem itself.  The real problem is that this document
> doesn't really reflect how things are done on most systems; simply excising
> mentions of LILO doesn't really fix that.
>

I completely agree.

> Or, for example:
>
>> +   The kernel image file is usually /vmlinuz, /boot/vmlinuz, /bzImage or
>> +   /boot/bzImage.  To use the new kernel, save a copy of the old image and copy
>> +   the new image over the old one.
>
> Do you have any of those files on your system?  I think that kernels in the
> root are quite scarce anymore, and most of them don't have such simple
> names.  I would love to see all this fixed, but making it look updated
> without doing the job properly doesn't really help our users much, I think.
>

I don't have those files on my system anymore, I have
/boot/vmlinuz-linux and /boot/initramfs-linux.img but then again I'm
on Arch Linux.

I didn't want to document how every possible distro handles kernel
installs because that would be insane, there are too many distros and
the document would be too big.

So I want to keep that section as generic as possible, but still
useful enough for users.

How about if we replace that line with something like this:

"All modern bootloaders are prepared to understand modern filesystems,
so there is no longer any need for special names, symlinks, mapfiles,
or explicit regeneration of block offsets. You can call your new
kernel whatever you want & put it wherever your chosen bootloader can
find it"

Do you have any better ideas? I'm happy to send another patch, but I
also need your help as English isn't my native language.

> Thanks,
>
> jon

Thanks,

Diego
--
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/