boot2 broken ? (booting from pst fails)

[Valentin Nechayev]

 Mon, Apr 14, 2003 at 23:36:59, eckert (Toerless Eckert) wrote about "Re: boot2 broken ? (booting from pst fails)": 

TE> Don't forget that neither 3ware nor promise list FreeBSD as a supported
TE> operating system, both are equally listed in FreeBSDs hardware list,
TE> there's no indication that booting for one of them doesn't work but
TE> that it's supposed to work on the other. Neither does the documentation
TE> of boot2 or loader explain the possible issue so as to buy possible buyers.

TE> It would really be nice if this boot-compatiblity/incompatiblity information
TE> would be documented somehwere. Like in pst(4) and boot(8).

It's not so simple as you think. HCLs (hardware compatibility lists) are
stably available only having stable and documented (even under NDA) feature
lists of hardware and feature access methods in software. For PC world,
it isn't method of duty work; e.g. mainboard manufacturers can skip EDD
support from some versions of their BIOSes basing on some internal and
non-exported information and decisions, even nowadays; and booting from
such mainboard requires more strict partitioning scheme or even dirty tricks
(as placing unused, but formatted, FAT16 slice at beginning of boot disk).
Reality in PC/Wintel world is devil's dance of drivers variants,
tiny-but-painful deviations against standards, etc. Moscow PC construction
market, e.g., contains now ~1000 different mainboards for P-III, P-4 and Athlon
CPU groups. Who have enough resources to test all of them? ;((
OS vendor, as FreeBSD, tries to keep average between all them and provide
product which working on most, and all this in conditions of permanent
resource lacking. You can do your's best. You already posted here about
problems of booting from such controller, and it is recorded in mailing
list archives. If you can, fix it. If no, change hardware and hope that
somebody will fix it as soon as possible.


-netch-