mdraid and hpa upgrade issues

[Jarod Wilson]

Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le Ven 25 mai 2007 16:24, Alan Cox a écrit :
>> On Fri, May 25, 2007 at 09:44:09AM -0400, Jarod Wilson wrote:
>>> Personally, I'd rather see us respect the hpa whenever we can. Just
>>> seems like the correct thing to do. Then again, it sounds like the
>>> only
>>> case where its really necessary, the bios hard-codes it anyhow...
>> Its a real PITA to answer that. HPA is uses for
>>
>> 1. Hiding Windoze recovery partitions	(depends on the user what is
>> "right")
>> 2. Clipping disks to work around old BIOSen (want to remove)
>> 3. Hiding suspend partitions (generally want to keep it on)
>> 4. Clipping odd sector count disks to even sizes (want to keep on)
>>
>> and more..

Ew.

As an aside, it would be nice if we could enable/disable hpa on a 
per-drive (or at least per-controller) basis.

> Can't HPA be used by default for new installations, and be disabled
> when the user asks to upgrade a pre-hpa fedora system ?

This late in the game, looks like we're going to stick with what we've 
got right now, which is HPA respected by default, and the ability to 
override it at install time if the installer is booted with 
libata.ignore_hpa=1. First go 'round, those with partitions in the hpa 
are going to get an ugly error message, but we'll stick something in 
F7KnownIssues (or whatever it is) like we did for FC6 documenting the 
work-around.

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jwilson at redhat.com