Re: Restoring HDIO_GETGEO semantics for 2.6 (was: Re: [RFC] Restoring HDIO_GETGEO semantics)

Steffen Winterfeldt
2004-07-06T08:34:08Z

On Tue, 6 Jul 2004, Szakacsits Szabolcs wrote:

> On Mon, 5 Jul 2004, Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz wrote:
> > On Monday 05 of July 2004 23:08, Andries Brouwer wrote:

[...]

> Are you really not aware of the seriousness of the issue? Didn't you read
> the bugzilla URL's sent? LWN, Eweeks, O'Reilly, OSNews, Slashdot, Amazon
> and many others discussed this 2.6 kernel problem already. Only kernel
> developers aren't aware of it? :-o
>
> > > Also "the old situation" is badly defined. The returned value differs
> > > for 2.0, 2.2, 2.4, 2.6.
>
> 2.4 was slightly broken. 2.6 is much more broken than 2.4 from the
> number of partition table corruptions point of view.

Neither 2.6 nor 2.4 are broken. It was well known all the time that
HDIO_GETGEO returns CHS values that are close to useless: all partitioning
tools spend lots of time on partition table guesswork. I really don't see a
point in blaming 2.6 here.

Nevertheless we have the fact that parted and kernel 2.6 don't work well
together. Now what? To get out of this people have to get either a changed
parted or a changed kernel.

And IMO it's far better to fix parted than to reintroduce an obscure piece
of code into the kernel.

Steffen