Re: Why does sysinstall still limits cylinders to 65535?

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@xxxxxxxxxxx>
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circumvent the outdated limit of 65535 cylinders (see attached patch).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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