Seewer Philippe wrote:
...Thats why I said i didn't want to start another geometry war. But
then again, I did write RFC too, yes?
Yes, geometry is a fiction. And a bad one at that. To be honest I'd
rather get rid of it completely. But you said it: The geometry still
exists for the sake of backward compatibility. If it is still there, why
not export it? That's what sysfs is for...
Because AFAIK, the kernel does not know the geometry. To find out you
have to ask the bios, and calling the bios is a no-no. That's assuming
the disk is even visible to the bios.
Additionally have a look at libata-scsi.c which is part of the SATA
implementation. Theres CHS code in there...
Personally I want the geometry information in sysfs because debugging
partition tables not written by linux tools becomes just that tad more
easier...
The geometry expressed in the partition table by whatever utility
created it will be the geometry that the bios reported the disk had at
the time the tool created the MBR, which can change if you plug the disk
into another machine with different bios. If there is already geometry
in the MBR, then you should use those values and take them at face value.
I did not say I'd implement it for _all_ devices. In fact I indent to
make geometry available only for devices whose drivers provide the
getgeo function.
AFAIK, most drivers do provide a getgeo function... but do they get the
information from the bios at boot time, or do they make it up? If it is
just made up anyhow, then why bother? I am not sure how it could even
be possible to get the information from the bios at boot time, and
figure out the correct mapping between bios devices and the real
hardware, which the driver is talking to. Since the geometry is
entirely made up anyhow why bother asking the driver to make it up when
that can be done in user space just as easily?
Exactly. I don't want the kernel to fix BIOS problems. But i want to
give userland the opportunity to overwrite what the kernel thinks (as in
/proc/ide/hdx/settings).
One example where this might be usable is connecting a PATA drive using
an Adapter to SATA. PATA returns the drive's geometry. SATA defaults to
x/255/63...
But neither one is any more correct than the other. Both are bogus
values, so what does it matter which is used? What good would having
this value stored in the kernel do? The kernel itself does not use it.
User mode tools that for some reason need to talk about it can just use
the values stored in the MBR.
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