On Mon, Nov 20, 2006 at 05:28:12PM +0000, Alan wrote:
> The reason I ask is that they put the partition in the last sector which
> means a block read of the last sector goes off the end of the disk and
> certainly used to be mishandled by the IDE code.
After reading it a second time, I'll see if I got it straight now:
.) the kernel always loads even-aligned pairs of sectors.
.) for an odd-sectored disk, this results in the GPT plus the
following (non-existent) sector being accessed from disk.
.) the old, unmaintained ide-driver generally does not handle
the odd-size case right, as it misinterprets the harddisks
error for the second sector (the one after the end) as a
general error causing dma to be turned off, after some retries.
It would also do that, if I later accessed the last sector
(e.g. dd if=/dev/hda ..., or by accessing a file that happens
to be stored there per filesystem, if at all possible),
not just during the initial GPT-check.
.) If I remove the "addr++;", then the harddisk is actually
believed to be 1 sector smaller than it really is, which
means that it looks like an even-sized disk. This could mean
that an eventually existing GPT could be missed. What would
be the "worst-case" consequences?
.) if ((old ide-driver) && (odd # of sectors)) youre_doomed_anyway(); ?
Right so far?
If yes, then wouldn't it be most sane to generally *ignore*
any trailing single sectors, at least as long as we still have
to deal with old ide driver:
addr = (addr & ~1) + 1;
Since this piece of code is in the old ide-disk.c, it would
become ineffective automatically, once libpata (or what it's
called) is ready to take over.
Thanks for caring.
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to [email protected]
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
[Index of Archives]
[Kernel Newbies]
[Netfilter]
[Bugtraq]
[Photo]
[Stuff]
[Gimp]
[Yosemite News]
[MIPS Linux]
[ARM Linux]
[Linux Security]
[Linux RAID]
[Video 4 Linux]
[Linux for the blind]
[Linux Resources]
