From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S262370AbUGEVIj (ORCPT ); Mon, 5 Jul 2004 17:08:39 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S262418AbUGEVIi (ORCPT ); Mon, 5 Jul 2004 17:08:38 -0400 Received: from hera.cwi.nl ([192.16.191.8]:44438 "EHLO hera.cwi.nl") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S262370AbUGEVIb (ORCPT ); Mon, 5 Jul 2004 17:08:31 -0400 Date: Mon, 5 Jul 2004 23:08:13 +0200 From: Andries Brouwer To: Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz Cc: Andries Brouwer , Szakacsits Szabolcs , Andries Brouwer , "Patrick J. LoPresti" , bug-parted@gnu.org, Steffen Winterfeldt , Thomas Fehr , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Andrew Clausen , buytenh@gnu.org, msw@redhat.com Subject: Re: Restoring HDIO_GETGEO semantics for 2.6 (was: Re: [RFC] Restoring HDIO_GETGEO semantics) Message-ID: <20040705210813.GE29504@apps.cwi.nl> References: <200407051513.48334.bzolnier@elka.pw.edu.pl> <20040705140044.GB24899@wsdw14.win.tue.nl> <200407052105.05585.bzolnier@elka.pw.edu.pl> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <200407052105.05585.bzolnier@elka.pw.edu.pl> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4i Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Mon, Jul 05, 2004 at 09:05:05PM +0200, Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz wrote: > Andries, the question was "What should we do with HDIO_GETGEO breakage?" > not "Why does somebody need the BIOS geometry?". :-) > > We can fix HDIO_GETGEO to behave like in 2.4 or remove it (preferable), > current situation is bad. I don't know precisely why. Neither of your two proposed actions appeals to me. Here is an ioctl, and it is used for legitimate purposes (finding the starting offset of a partition). You cannot remove it. We can think again in 2.7. For now, leave the kernel interface constant. Is there any advantage in going back? I don't think so. The old situation was broken. People lost all data. Also "the old situation" is badly defined. The returned value differs for 2.0, 2.2, 2.4, 2.6. No. We must go forward. Now distributions can take care of themselves. They can patch the kernel as they like, or patch parted as they like, or do any number of other things. RedHat and SuSE can take their own decisions. With some luck there is a new parted next week or so that they could offer. So we can go slowly and quietly, investigate precisely what happens, and why and how such things can be fixed. I think I understand rather well what is (was) wrong with parted. Maybe Szaka can teach me about other tools that are broken. I am confident that we can fix them, maybe in hours rather than days. As a side result we will have something valuable, namely standard software that tries to handle BIOS data. Several orders of magnitude more reliable than our old guesses. Andries