Re: ATA 4 KiB sector issues.

["Martin K. Petersen" <martin.petersen@oracle.com>]

>>>>> "hpa" == H Peter Anvin <hpa@zytor.com> writes:

>> Huh, what?  My homedir is on a 4KiB LBS/PBS drive and has been for ~2
>> years.

hpa> For > 2 TiB drives with 4 KiB logical sectors and MS-DOS partition
hpa> tables, it is.

Ah, that.  Already fixed, I believe.


>> 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.

hpa> I think that's is wildly optimistic, 

I don't expect XP to go away any time soon.  But do I think that the
number of fresh XP installs in combination with Linux will be fairly
limited.  And general lack of hardware enablement will eventually kill
off XP on raw metal.

I think it's ok that we have stop-gap solutions in place for
interoperability.  But I wouldn't want to waste all our resources on
designing for the past.  I'm much more interested in making sure that
single-boot Linux is doing the right thing.


>> FWIW, recent fdisk has a command line flag that will enable/disable
>> DOS compatible layout.

hpa> Yes, unfortunately it is still on by default.

I agree that this is a don't-be-broken option and I would prefer it the
other way around (I know that's the plan for the next release.  I just
hope the distributions get things right).

-- 
Martin K. Petersen	Oracle Linux Engineering