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Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2010 10:13:51 -0700
From: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
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To: Ric Wheeler <rwheeler@redhat.com>
CC: Tejun Heo <tj@kernel.org>, James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@suse.de>,
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       Matthew Wilcox <matthew@wil.cx>, aschnell@suse.de, knikanth@suse.de
Subject: Re: ATA 4 KiB sector issues.
References: <6af388e7-e313-4212-86c8-30ffa327411c@email.android.com> <4BA0F057.7020909@redhat.com>
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On 03/17/2010 08:08 AM, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> On 03/16/2010 06:21 PM, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>> The only reason I see to care about CHS at all is that there are
>> systems in the field which can only boot from USB in CHS mode, and
>> which often look at the MBR partition table to guess the geometry. Of
>> course, some then *report* the detected geometry but don't *use* the
>> detected geometry...
>
> These systems, given the changes in modern microsoft releases, must be
> doomed even without any effort on our part.
>
> I still think that we should work to make this ancient stuff disappear &
> help force the legacy edge cases to modernize. It has been some huge
> amount of time since storage vendors pretty much abandoned CHS (15
> years? 20?) :-)
>

I wish.  This is mostly systems from the first half of the 2000's 
timeframe.  There was a *huge* regression when BIOS vendors started 
doing USB boot; almost all of them introduced major bugs at that time; 
in many cases they still haven't been fixed.

	-hpa