Re: aic7xxx_biosparam

J.E.J. Bottomley
2002-11-18T03:20:14Z

dledford@redhat.com said:
> Hmmm..should that be changed though?

I hope not. If we implement BIG_GETGEO then I've made all the wrong decisions
for biosparam: since it can pass back ints, the implementations should all be
using sector_div and we should do the truncation in the GETGEO ioctl since we
can use the same biosparam call for both ioctls.

> I beg to differ. At least on the Adaptec stuff, it gets pissy if the
> partition tables don't look sane (at least older BIOSes do, and those
> cards are still in use, so that means I try and make them work).
> Besides, when I make changes in this code, the effects are instantly
> visible in fdisk (well, after a module reload), so it get's used
> somewhere.

The argument is that no user space tools rely on the cyls value, only the
sectors and heads. They all use the GETGEO ioctl, but also get the blocksize
of the device and divide this out by the sectors*heads to get the true cyls
value.

I know this is the wrong short term decision: you should never implement an
interface wrongly because it causes exactly this type of confusion. I'm just
betting on the C/H/S mess being sorted out soon....I hope.

James