Thinkpad, Thinkpad, Thinkpad

[Alan Cox]

On Wed, Mar 29, 2006 at 02:48:04PM -0500, Peter Jones wrote:
> Yeah.  But right now the installer doesn't have any data available about
> HPA at all, so it can't do the partitioning right if we're disabling HPA
> (which we are).

Right because it was disabled too early for the installer to check

> Which means for FC6, we have to disable HPA by default, and
> conditionally re-enable it if there's no partition table entry that
> points above the top.

You never need to re-enable it. The partition table and partition sizes
define the size of hda1 and fs etc.

> Tangentally, I might add that if Fibre Channel, iSCSI, or similar ever
> invent a function like this, we better not screw it up as much as we
> have this time, because changing the geometry of another machine's disk
> is seriously not fun to recover from.  Just my introspective thought for
> the day.

If you want real fun try mixing EFI firmware, GPT and HPA. So I really hope HPA
goes away. Its like drive passwords, a fine example of why storage device 
designers should be allowed to invent things that are OS matters 8)

> > HPA out after the ACPI stuff runs once it is in as on the thinkpad it also
> > edits the HPA settings when those run
> 
> OK... is there a patch floating around for the _GTF stuff already?  URL?
> Also, are (whoever's doing it) doing _GTM/_STM work as well?

The stuff done so far went to l/k and is a work in progress.