support for drives larger than 2TiB

[Peter M. Petrakis]

On 07/25/2010 09:25 AM, Tim Gardner wrote:
> Colin,
>
> Something we're gonna have to start dealing with pretty soon:
>
> http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=127996556318938&w=2
>
> I wonder if there are some tests you can add to the BIOS test tool,
> e.g., how to test for drives that have non-traditional block sizes,

READ CAPACITY is your friend,
http://www.t10.org/cgi-bin/ac.pl?t=f&f=sbc3r22.pdf

Secton 5.15

- will definitively tell you how large the disk is
- the length of a block in # bytes

$ sudo sg_readcap  /dev/sda
Read Capacity results:
    Last logical block address=250069679 (0xee7c2af), Number of blocks=250069680
    Logical block length=512 bytes
Hence:
    Device size: 128035676160 bytes, 122104.3 MiB, 128.04 GB

> large partition sizes, what boot partitions are useable, etc. Perhaps a
> part of the test tool will have to run from the grub menu (like memtest).

This might be out of scope for a bios test tool. The limitation as I understand
the issue is more due to the partition style than anything else. BIOS has supported
LBA48 (ATA anyways, this isn't an issue for SCSI if recall correctly) for a long time
which addresses well more than 2TiB. The issue could use some more exploration
for certain.

Peter
  
> rtg