Re: Confirmation; Severe ext2fs Corruption in 2.1.98

mlord (mlord@pobox.com)
Sat, 30 May 1998 16:06:20 -0400


Richard B. Johnson wrote:
...
> found that a bad inode entry, that attempts to access beyond the physical
> media, does not seem to be limit-checked anywhere. Therefore, with SCSI,
> the driver will fail <forever> as it keeps getting errors from the drive,
> keeps resetting the bus, card, driver, etc., then tries to access beyond
> the drive again and again and again. Boot-switch time.
>
> Now, with IDE, since the head/cylinder/sector translation is virtual and
> cheap, they will wrap the drive. In other words, warp past some max and
> back up through zero. The result is the access doesn't fail! Instead,
> you eventually write something where it shouldn't be.
>
> I think that some code somewhere should really check access limits.

Errr... there is code in ll_rw_block.c to check against access limits.

I have never heard of an "IDE wrap around" rumour before.

-- 
mlord@pobox.com
The Linux IDE guy

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