[haiku-development] Re: Hard drive BIOS number for device?

Michael Pfeiffer <michael.w.pfeiffer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Am 16.04.2008 um 19:27 schrieb Axel Dörfler:
> > Michael Pfeiffer <michael.w.pfeiffer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >> In order to boot from another than the first hard drive the
> > > bootman
> >> UI
> >> needs a mapping from hard drive device path to the BIOS hard drive
> >> number, that starts with 0x80 for the first drive.
> >> Is there an API already that provides that information?
> > Yes there is, it's just not implemented in Haiku yet
> > (B_GET_BIOS_DRIVE_ID ioctl()) :-)
> Great. Whom do I have to pay to get it implemented :-)

Do you insist on not looking yourself? ;-)
It's even a bit of work, but I can outline it a bit:
1) the boot loader needs to make a connection between drive ID and disk
in a way that the OS can recognize it again. IIRC BeOS uses a sum/hash
of the contents of a few blocks until it has enough to differentiate
all (BIOS) drives. The name, or serial number is probably not reliably
available from the BIOS, but I haven't really tried that yet.
2) it would need to store that information in the kernel_args
structure.
3) when the OS detects the drives, it would see in that structure how
it can recognize the drive again, and can then store the BIOS ID of
that drive internally, so that B_GET_BIOS_DRIVE_ID can work as
expected.

I guess we need this one day :-)

Bye,
   Axel.

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