linux-kernel - Re: [PATCH 0/4] partitions/ide: improve Host Protected Area handling

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Date:	Sun, 31 May 2009 22:04:11 +0200
From:	Frans Pop <elendil@...net.nl>
To:	Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz <bzolnier@...il.com>
Cc:	linux-ide@...r.kernel.org,
	"Andries E. Brouwer" <Andries.Brouwer@....nl>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org,
	Robert Hancock <hancockrwd@...il.com>,
	Al Viro <viro@...iv.linux.org.uk>
Subject: Re: [PATCH 0/4] partitions/ide: improve Host Protected Area handling

On Sunday 31 May 2009, Bartlomiej Zolnierkiewicz wrote:
> Since from the perspective of most users of recent systems, disabling
> Host Protected Area (HPA) can break vendor RAID formats, GPT partitions
> and risks corrupting firmware or overwriting vendor system recovery
> tools this patchset makes the IDE subsystem preserve HPA by default.

Kudos! I have to leave a real review of the patches to others more 
qualified than me, but where the previous patch set raised all sorts of 
questions for me, this just looks logical.

I conclude the following from reading the patches:
- a HPA is always at the end of a disk, correct?
- the only case where a user should notice a change after switching
  to 2.6.30 is if he has a partition that starts on or after the
  start of the HPA: such a partition will be ignored (with warning
  in dmesg); I guess that is reasonable as at least it will prevent
  "broken" partitions and is probably relatively uncommon.

Thanks for your continued work on this Bart.

Cheers,
FJP
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