Re: [PATCH] /proc/ide/hd?/geometry (un)signedness 2.2.10, 2.3.8

Guest section DW (dwguest@win.tue.nl)
Sat, 3 Jul 1999 16:03:47 +0200 (MET DST)


From: Matthias Andree <mandree@sx1.hrz.uni-dortmund.de>

| % uname -a
| Linux emma1 2.2.10 #4 Wed Jun 23 22:58:57 CEST 1999 i586 unknown
| % cat /proc/ide/hda/geometry
| physical -25976/16/63
| logical 2482/255/63

Find the patch against 2.2.10 attached. (Also works for 2.3.8 with 9
line offset, untested since 2.3.8 doesn't compile for me.)

Yes, this came up already. It is fixed in 2.3.9.

BTW: What will happen for IDE drives that are larger than 32256 MB (31.5 GB
== 33.8 marketing GB)? That's the limit for 65535/16/63 geometry.

Marketing? Anyone who says something else is violating several standards.
The abbreviation G stands for 10^9. There is a proposal to use Gi as a prefix
for 2^30, so that you might use 31.5 GiB = 33.8 GB.
(You might wish to look at the archives for the discussion that we had a few
months ago, or at the Large Disk HOWTO.)

Yes, what will happen?
The question is not well-defined.
What does one need a geometry for? Not to access the disk.
(For IDE access the present limit is 137 GB, and new draft standards
considerably raise this limit.)
To print interesting numbers for people doing `cat /proc/ide/hda/geometry'?
We'll remove this pseudo-file, I suppose.
The whole concept of geometry is obsolete. A disk does not have a geometry.
Any interface that requires a geometry is broken.

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