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

lists.openwall.net		lists / announce owl-users owl-dev john-users john-dev passwdqc-users yescrypt popa3d-users / oss-security kernel-hardening musl sabotage tlsify passwords / crypt-dev xvendor / Bugtraq Full-Disclosure linux-kernel linux-netdev linux-ext4 linux-hardening linux-cve-announce PHC
Open Source and information security mailing list archives

Hash Suite: Windows password security audit tool. GUI, reports in PDF.

[<prev] [next>] [<thread-prev] [thread-next>] [day] [month] [year] [list]

Message-Id: <200905312204.12549.elendil@planet.nl>
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
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@...r.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/