Here’s a question: when I first installed my system, I was greeted with something like this… It was originally on sda, but then it changed to sda1.

Does anyone know what’s going on there?

Excelent!

* Your option #9 “revese” is not actually an option that can be passed to the kernel (I htink you mean “reserve”)

* Booting from BIOS, regardless of where the kernel is located (CD-ROM, hard drive, floppy, tape, etc.) requires the use of a boot loader because the kernel is too large to fit entirely into the space which the BIOS can see

* The article does not explain how someone would actually go about passing these options (e.g., edit the kernel command line at the boot loader prompt, edit the configuration and re-install the boot loader)

* The explanations don’t provide any useful examples (like the mem, console, and reserve options)

* The explanations leave out relevatively important uses (like using mem to limit the amount of memoery used in a VM host to leave the rest free for guests, like in Xen)

* You don’t cover how to get the current kernel command line (cat /proc/cmdline)

The article has potential, but appears to be hastily written and incomplete. Here is an excerpt from an O’Reilly book, which is more complete:

http://oreilly.com/linux/excerpts/9780596100797/kernel-boot-command-line-parameter-reference.html

Of course, the best place to look for information on this is the file Documentation/kernel-parameters.txt in the kernel source distribution, which provides the comprehensive list of hundreds of kernel command line options, along with the format for specifying each one.