On Thu, Feb 10, 2011 at 01:58:58PM -0500, Phillip Susi wrote: > > It's unfortunate you won't listen but continue to spout stuff from a > > standard no vendor, no OS and no product ever followed. ATA is not built > > on strict adherance to formal standards, nor is the PC. > > Microsoft's OS follows it. Try to do anything slightly advanced with BIOS RAIDs. It works only when you stay inside the pretty confined use case dictated by the hardware/driver vendor and what's supported varies widely depending on which BIOS RAID you're using. Really, think about how they would handle hot swap. > Even if dmraid works around it, you are still left with: > > 1) Possibly trashing data the bios put on the hd and told you not to touch Unlocking doesn't equal thrashing and if root wants to ignore BIOS suggestions, root shall be able to. More importantly, BIOSen having control over some part of disk never works reliably. It might have worked ten years ago when hardware configuration never changed without intervening system resets and POSTs. These days, it's just not possible. Hardware comes and goes while the system is running and there's no way for BIOS to do anything about it. The only valid use case would be stuff like recovery partitions on laptops and instant boot thingies on some motherboards. Installation tools seemed to deal with them well enough. > 2) Rebooting after running Linux leaves the drive unlocked, which > causes the fakeraid bios to complain that your raid is broken. People > don't like that. That's something BIOS writers should deal with. Report it to them. Distros can be nice and lock it again during shutdown sequence from userland too but I don't think it's something which should dictate the decisions. Thanks. -- tejun -- 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
