From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1754071Ab0CDAS0 (ORCPT ); Wed, 3 Mar 2010 19:18:26 -0500 Received: from terminus.zytor.com ([198.137.202.10]:43270 "EHLO mail.zytor.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1753555Ab0CDASU (ORCPT ); Wed, 3 Mar 2010 19:18:20 -0500 Message-ID: <4B8EFC2A.8070303@zytor.com> Date: Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:17:46 -0800 From: "H. Peter Anvin" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.7) Gecko/20100120 Fedora/3.0.1-1.fc12 Thunderbird/3.0.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Daniel Taylor CC: OGAWA Hirofumi , Andrew Morton , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: [PATCH] msdos: add support for large disks References: <3E0C3AE547FA504DA5E89EA5A24AC85803E2BD2D@wdscexbe01.sc.wdc.com><20100301141335.395dc4c3.akpm@linux-foundation.org> <873a0h1p2c.fsf@devron.myhome.or.jp> <3E0C3AE547FA504DA5E89EA5A24AC85803E2BD53@wdscexbe01.sc.wdc.com> <4B8EEB2D.4090106@zytor.com> <3E0C3AE547FA504DA5E89EA5A24AC85803E2BD56@wdscexbe01.sc.wdc.com> In-Reply-To: <3E0C3AE547FA504DA5E89EA5A24AC85803E2BD56@wdscexbe01.sc.wdc.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On 03/03/2010 03:24 PM, Daniel Taylor wrote: > > Those are good points. We (WD) are trying to get the NDAs, regarding our > specific not-yet-released products, in place to get the userspace utilities > updated, and WD is also in communication with the Windows tool developers. > > Fundamentally, though, the way Windows XP, which only supports MBR > partitioning, can use a disk drive capacity larger than 2 TiB is with sector > sizes larger than 512 bytes. That is far too large a slice of the installed > base for the disk drive makers to ignore, so these drives and partitions are > going to be released, whether by WD, or someone else. When someone plugs > one of these disks into a system running Linux, we don't need to hear about > "Linux doesn't support it", if there's a reasonable accomodation. In this > case, both the inputs MBR partitioning, and the data stored as a result, are > fully capable. It is only the intermediate variables in the module that are > currently hard-coded to 32-bits, and which truncate the values. > I should probably clarify that I was not, in any way, objecting to the patch; quite on the contrary. -hpa