Re: [PATCH 0/4] partitions/ide: improve Host Protected Area handling

Frans Pop
2009-05-31T20:04:22Z

On Sunday 31 May 2009, Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz wrote:
> Since from the perspective of most users of recent systems, disabling
> Host Protected Area (HPA) can break vendor RAID formats, GPT partitions
> and risks corrupting firmware or overwriting vendor system recovery
> tools this patchset makes the IDE subsystem preserve HPA by default.

Kudos! I have to leave a real review of the patches to others more
qualified than me, but where the previous patch set raised all sorts of
questions for me, this just looks logical.

I conclude the following from reading the patches:
- a HPA is always at the end of a disk, correct?
- the only case where a user should notice a change after switching
to 2.6.30 is if he has a partition that starts on or after the
start of the HPA: such a partition will be ignored (with warning
in dmesg); I guess that is reasonable as at least it will prevent
"broken" partitions and is probably relatively uncommon.

Thanks for your continued work on this Bart.

Cheers,
FJP