mdraid and hpa upgrade issues

[Tony Nelson]

At 5:11 PM +0200 5/25/07, 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..
>
>Can't HPA be used by default for new installations, and be disabled
>when the user asks to upgrade a pre-hpa fedora system ?

I think the issue is the other way around.  Until F7, by default the kernel
disabled the HPA temporarily on each boot.  Thus, the drive is formatted to
use thw whole size.  But now that the behavior has changed, and the drive
size is smaller than the formatted size.  So it isn't new installations
that are having a problem (unless the protected area is large), but old
installations that won't be upgradable.  I expect this is all fallout from
the change to "all disks are SCSI disks".
-- 
____________________________________________________________________
TonyN.:'                       <mailto:tonynelson at georgeanelson.com>
      '                              <http://www.georgeanelson.com/>