[Fwd: Re: regarding libata HPA default behavior]

Luiz Fernando N. Capitulino lcapitulino at mandriva.com.br
Thu Sep 6 17:59:31 UTC 2007


Em Thu, 6 Sep 2007 14:38:48 +0100
Matthew Garrett <mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org> escreveu:

| > Seems to me the dangers and damage caused by a suddenly-too-small disk 
| > are greater than those caused by a suddenly-larger disk.  The latter 
| > case only confuses schemes that are offset from the last reported LBA, 
| > whereas the former can cause data loss and worse.
| 
| Indeed. When we transitioned to libata for pata devices, a large number 
| of users suddenly had regressions. It's not just an issue for laptops, 
| there's a moderate number of desktop drives that are clipped to 32GB in 
| order to avoid breaking ancient Phoenix BIOSes. The traditional 
| behaviour of drivers/ide has resulted in many people having file systems 
| that extend into the HPA, and breaking those setups wasn't acceptable 
| for us. As a result, we extend the disk by default in Ubuntu.

 Althought Mandriva still provides default libata settings, I'm
with Matthew here and I'm considering to make that change.

 Tejun, I think that by trying to be compatible with everything
will cause more trouble than fixes.

 We'll have to make a choice, I think the one that causes less
troubles is to maintain compability with the IDE drivers.

-- 
Luiz Fernando N. Capitulino




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