Respecting the Host Protected Area

[Phillip Susi]

Ben Collins wrote:
> It's entirely in the harddrive. There are utilities that can configure
> it to remove it permanently, or modify the HPA.

Could you point me to one?  Maybe on upgrade we could detect the 
condition where part of an existing partition extends into the HPA and 
if so, prompt the user to disable it permanently, but otherwise, do the 
right thing and respect it.

> It is interesting that the IDE driver has been like this since forever,
> and it was never changed upstream. True, they got things right the
> second time, nearly a decade later, with libata, but that doesn't negate
> the problem we, as a distribution, have to account for.

It was probably never fixed because so few people ever had a reason to 
notice.  Not many systems make use of HPA and of those that do, how many 
people actually ran into one of the issues that caused?  Of those, how 
many managed to figure out what the cause of the problem was?

Now that the problem has been identified and fixed, let us do the right 
thing going forward so as not to cause these problems in the future, 
rather than diverge from mainline and retain the old, broken behavior.