Why doesn CS support the use of a SCSI boot disk?
The goal of White is to unify Linux support across all of LNS with a single bootable OS installation image. While every PC motherboard supports booting off of a variety of standard IDE devices, support for booting from a SCSI device is handled by each SCSI chipset slightly differently. To write a functional boot block to a SCSI disk the proper disk geometry must be fed to the boot loader and the SCSI controller must have a loadable module set up in an “initial ramdisk image” (initrd). None of these problems exist with IDE simply because IDE is native to all PCs and as such IDE support is always compiled directly into the kernel. SCSI boot disks complicate the installation process making CS less able to script updates and upgrades across all LNS workstations. Note that CS does support the use of SCSI disks for data01 storage.