On Tue, 2010-04-06 at 11:01 +0900, Tejun Heo wrote: > Hello, > > On 04/03/2010 06:57 AM, Ben Hutchings wrote: > > Several distributions have turned on the switch by default. As I said > > previously, this turned out to be a bad idea. > > Heh, yeah, I did that on openSUSE which was mandatory for backward > compatibility because ide unlocked HPA by default (at least on > openSUSE). Do you know how common are these problem cases w/ default > HPA unlocking? No idea, but they look serious enough to worry about. > Diddling with HPAs and writing stuff to disks from > BIOS is generally a very bad idea because it means that switching BIOS > options or attaching a hard drive to a different motherboard can lead > to data corruption. If a system vendor puts its own name or model numbers on the disks it ships then I think the BIOS or other platform firmware can reasonably assume that it 'owns' and can write to the HPA on a disk with the vendor's identification. (I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that some vendors take shortcuts though.) [...] > > My test case also revealed a bug in the partition scanning retry: > > partition 2 is an extended partition and wholly within the HPA, so the > > extended partition table is not accessible until the HPA is disabled. > > But it is not rescanned after the HPA is disabled. However, this is is > > consistent between IDE and libata drivers and will not be a regression > > when making the transition. > > Ah... I see, but let's fix that up too. It could be worse to have > half working workaround than not working around at all. I'll update > the patch once the currently pending HPA updates are in. Oh, what are those? I want to apply some version of this fix in Debian soon so we can complete the transition to libata. I would very much appreciate it if you could answer whether or not the multiple 'capacity change' messages may indicate a problem. Ben. -- Ben Hutchings Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it makes it worse.
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