Good grief. I’m afraid you misunderstood - I meant no sarcasm at all. After all, it was you that wrote you had been a programmer for so loooooong. All I did was make a friendly in-kind response - I’ve been in this game a loooooong time, too. I meant no offense.
I’m an old salt, too. I also can name lots of machines, OS’s, apps, ad nauseum. I’ve personally met Gates (though thankfully he was arguing with someone else). I even had several sessions with Steve Jobs. Jeez, Steve and Bill deserve one another. Heck, I’ve even worked on much of the same kinds of software as you have. You “really meant long”? - well, I believe you. Actually, I been in this game for even a few years longer than you have. (Work in the Valley, by chance?) Maybe someday if we’re lucky we can scrawl dirty-old-man messages in assembler on the nursing home wall just to terrorize Nurse Ratchet.
So whaddya say, let’s drop the dueling credentials at ten paces and focus on the problem instead?
First, if I may say so, I’m not clear why you’re not taking the issue to Novell; your requirements are enterprise-scale. Apparently your client wants to use free software without support? That’s certainly the client’s prerogative, but here at openSUSE you are just reaching knowledgeable users, not the engineers.
You could file an openSUSE bugzilla report, but frankly I doubt you’d gain much traction. I’ve worked these forums a good while, and I’ve only see what you’ve described once or twice at the most. AFAIK, this is a real corner case. It’s not going to be viewed as harming an installed base. It’s not that I dispute that linuxrc shouldn’t choke (on what I’m guessing is a quirk in reading the bios map), but chances are that if Novell knew there were real revenues or real commercial customers at stake, the problem would receive entirely different attention. So imho, Novell is where to look.
I also confess that I don’t quite understand why disabling the ISA memory hole is not an option. There’s no harm in doing so, is there? If there were a problem in the kernel or critical mainline, of course that’s a different matter altogether. But this is just an installation setup program; there are a half-dozen other supported methods. And with a large number of machines, I would think you would use an enterprise-class process for installs and upgrades - so you might not see linuxrc at all. (It’s also conceivable that there may be a linuxrc argument that would work around the issue, but I’d have to look further into that to be sure.)
Finally, of course the reason you haven’t seen this in other distros is because the problem is in an openSUSE unique front-end program. I wished that weren’t so. If that’s not resolvable or can’t be worked around, well, I’m glad you found good alternatives.
Good luck and be well.
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