Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2008 10:30:37 -0400 From: John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Cc: "Carlos A. M. dos Santos" <unixmania@gmail.com>, Jeremy Chadwick <koitsu@freebsd.org>, Doug Barton <dougb@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Why does sysinstall still limits cylinders to 65535? Message-ID: <200806041030.37413.jhb@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <484602C5.7000400@FreeBSD.org> References: <e71790db0805251952uffce552ycaf7941eb81a8601@mail.gmail.com> <e71790db0806031925k541c8a4dlecdcef0ad036150@mail.gmail.com> <484602C5.7000400@FreeBSD.org>
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On Tuesday 03 June 2008 10:49:41 pm Doug Barton wrote: > Carlos A. M. dos Santos wrote: > > On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 3:24 AM, Jeremy Chadwick <koitsu@freebsd.org> wrote: > >> On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 11:52:06PM -0300, Carlos A. M. dos Santos wrote: > >>> I have been struglling with sysinstall, attempting to make it handle > >>> the geometry of some large SATA drives. After a lot of effort I > >>> decided to stop suffering and modified the program in order to > >>> circumvent the outdated limit of 65535 cylinders (see attached patch). > >>> I'm thinking about submitting a PR with a change request but I'd like > >>> to get some additional opinions first. I did not test it in "batch" > >>> mode, so it would be great if any kind soul did this. > >> Carlos, bottom line is to simply ignore the geometry warning you see. > >> > >> For others... > >> > >> This is just added evidence that the humongous warning spit out during > >> sysinstall's fdisk is confusing users (many taking it very seriously > >> when there's really no problem at all). > >> > >> I think this is the third time someone's brought this up in the past > >> couple months... > > > > Sorry if I sound annoying but nobody else answered. I still believe > > that something must be done to fix sysinstall, so I'm asking you > > (where "you" means the "others" in Jeremy's message) to provide some > > additional feedback. Please fill-in the dots in one or more of the > > following options: > > > > 1. We can not make such change sysinstall because ... > > > > 2. Your patch is not correct/sufficient. I would be better if ... > > > > 3. Please submit a PR. It will momentarily be reviewed by ... > > > > 4. Give up. Nobody here cares about this issue. > > 5. -stable is not the right list to discuss sysinstall issues. > freebsd-hackers would be the first choice, if you don't get a response > there, -current would be the next. > > Send the PR first, and in your message give a brief background of your > issue and a URL for the PR. That way when it gets reviewed the feedback > will be consolidated into one convenient location. > > If you want "momentary" review for your work, open source is probably > not the arena you should be looking to contribute in. 6. The Real Fix(tm) would be to change sysinstall to allow use of GPT partitions (GPT doesn't use C/H/S at all, so the warning would only be present for the MBR/BSD label case) and then enable those by default. You would still need to allow for MBR/BSD layouts for some embedded devices that don't support the BIOS EDD packet mode (i.e. doing disk I/O using LBA's rather than C/H/S). -- John Baldwin
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