Hello, On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 6:29 PM, Phillip Susi <psusi@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > That would also break a Windows drive. Are there any such biosen in > the wild? They should only add an HPA to a drive that is unformatted. Yes, it would break under windows and it does. Get a motherboard which always locks HPA, do hotplug, create filesystem filling the full disk and reboot. BIOS doesn't have a reliable way of determining whether the disk is "unformatted" or not. Some try to scan dos partition table but filesystem may be created on the whole device or software raid could be using the whole drive. There is no reliable way to tell. Some BIOSen may try to do HPA locking after hotplug using ACPI _GTF which in theory can work but in practice many motherboards either don't implement them or are horridly broken. So, yeah, it isn't too difficult to break whether the os is windows or linux. The only argument against unlocking by default and providing both sizes is that some BIOSen may act incorrectly after soft reset, which seems acceptable provided there's an override to disable the automatic unlocking. Maybe we should just add yet another param to suppress the block layer heuristics and be done with it. I don't know. Thanks. -- tejun -- dm-devel mailing list dm-devel@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/dm-devel
