Date: Wed, 10 Nov 2004 09:35:34 -0600
From: Matt Domsch <Matt_Domsch@dell.com>
To: Carl-Daniel Hailfinger <c-d.hailfinger.kernel.2004@gmx.net>
Cc: Michael E Brown <mebrown@michaels-house.net>, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH][RFC] Add boot sector checksums to EDD
Message-ID: <20041110153533.GA23981@lists.us.dell.com>
References: <4191A8D7.1030300@michaels-house.net> <4191ABE8.1060703@gmx.net>
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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
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