On 03/08/2010 07:18 AM, Martin K. Petersen wrote: > > Tejun> Partitioners maybe should only align partitions which will be > Tejun> used by Linux and default to the traditional layout for others > Tejun> while allowing explicit override. > > I don't think we take the partition type into account. Karel? > We should not take the partition type into account. The other aspect is that FAT partitions need to be formatted differently to maintain the alignment once set; I have recently contributed patches (which were accepted) into mkdosfs to do the right thing there. Looking at the Windows XP article, it looks like it is limited to certain BIOSes; unfortunately it doesn't say what the particular BIOS issue is. If we can find a system which actually exhibits the bug it might be possible to reverse-engineer a solution. > Tejun> Reportedly, commonly used partitioners aren't ready to handle > Tejun> drives larger than 2 TiB in any configuration and alignment isn't > Tejun> done properly for drives with 4 KiB physical sectors. 4 KiB > Tejun> logical sector support is broken in both the kernel > > Huh, what? My homedir is on a 4KiB LBS/PBS drive and has been for ~2 > years. For > 2 TiB drives with 4 KiB logical sectors and MS-DOS partition tables, it is. > Tejun> Unfortunately, the transition to 4 KiB sector size, physical only > Tejun> or logical too, is looking fairly ugly. Hopefully, a reasonable > Tejun> solution can be reached in not too distant future but even with > Tejun> all the software side updated, it looks like it's gonna cause > Tejun> significant amount of confusion and frustration. > > With regards to XP compatibility I don't think we should go too much out > of our way to accommodate it. XP has been disowned by its master and I > think virtualization will take care of the rest. I think that's is wildly optimistic, but I do observe there is a fix from Microsoft in the article you reference. > FWIW, recent fdisk has a command line flag that will enable/disable DOS > compatible layout. Yes, unfortunately it is still on by default. -hpa -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
