Re: [PATCH] IDE disks show invalid geometries in /proc/ide/hd*/geometry

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Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz wrote:

Hi,

The topic was discussed to death on linux-kernel.

Mark, you need to fix your applications and stop using /proc/ide/hd*/geometry
or/and HDIO_GET_GEO ioctl (which BTW your patch also affects).
Fixing the applications I can understand but the patch still seems necessary, to me, so the
HDIO_GET_GEO returns "rational" values.

I tested HDIO_GET_GEO and it returns the same broken values as go into /proc (no surprises) without my patch.

If a drive is in LBA mode (28 or 48 bit) the existing code doesn't always "fix up" the geometry properly for some value returns. It only tries with 48 bit mode and it fails there for some values. My patch forces a complete geometry and appears (to me) to preserve the side efefcts of the existing code.

Am I missing something?

mark

Bartlomiej

On 8/3/05, Andre Hedrick <[email protected]> wrote:
Did you read ATA-1 through ATA-7 to understand all the variations?

On Tue, 2 Aug 2005, Mark Bellon wrote:

The ATA specification tells large disk drives to return C/H/S data of
16383/16/63 regardless of their actual size (other variations on this
return include 15 heads and/or 4092 cylinders). Unfortunately these CHS
data confuse the existing IDE code and cause it to report invalid
geometries in /proc when the disk runs in LBA mode.

The invalid geometries can cause failures in the partitioning tools;
partitioning may be impossible or illogical size limitations occur. This
also leads to various forms of human confusion.

I attach a patch that fixes this problem while strongly attempting to
not break any existing side effects and await any comments.

mark

Signed-off-by: Mark Bellon <[email protected]>


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