Re: fdisk and 2048 sectors obsession.

[dE <de.techno@gmail.com>]

On 10/28/14 09:25, Felix Miata wrote:
> dE composed on 2014-10-28 08:54 (UTC+0530):
>
>> Felix Miata wrote:
>>> http://www.seagate.com/tech-insights/advanced-format-4k-sector-hard-drives-master-ti/
>>> may provide some insight WRT performance issues ensuing from other start
>>> sector selections.
>> But that works even with multiples of 8. So we can start from sector 8
>> in MBR and 40 in GPT.
> OK, as long as you know you'll never need a bootloader or other boot-time
> software that requires the "wasted" space between MBR and first partition
> sector. It seems M$ for Vista picked 2048 to reserve plenty of space for such
> a *possibility* (not necessarily expectation), so for compat reasons and
> other[1], other tools, including fdisk, decided to do the same at least by
> default.
>
> I've created partitions starting at sector 0x400 on 4k disks with no problems
> observed.
>
>> Also I'm pretty sure fdisk uses 2048 even with -b 4096, but
>> unfortunately I get --
>> *** Error in `fdisk': malloc(): memory corruption: 0x0000000002507330 ***
>>    with that switch.
> Bug somewhere?
>
> [1]
> http://www.anchor.com.au/blog/2012/10/the-difference-between-booting-mbr-and-gpt-with-grub/

Yeah, I'll file that bug.

But I also think this fdisk 2048 behavior should be removed now or at 
least provide a switch for the same and document this in the man page.