Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:17:46 -0800 | From | "H. Peter Anvin" <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH] msdos: add support for large disks |
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On 03/03/2010 03:24 PM, Daniel Taylor wrote: > > Those are good points. We (WD) are trying to get the NDAs, regarding our > specific not-yet-released products, in place to get the userspace utilities > updated, and WD is also in communication with the Windows tool developers. > > Fundamentally, though, the way Windows XP, which only supports MBR > partitioning, can use a disk drive capacity larger than 2 TiB is with sector > sizes larger than 512 bytes. That is far too large a slice of the installed > base for the disk drive makers to ignore, so these drives and partitions are > going to be released, whether by WD, or someone else. When someone plugs > one of these disks into a system running Linux, we don't need to hear about > "Linux doesn't support it", if there's a reasonable accomodation. In this > case, both the inputs MBR partitioning, and the data stored as a result, are > fully capable. It is only the intermediate variables in the module that are > currently hard-coded to 32-bits, and which truncate the values. >
I should probably clarify that I was not, in any way, objecting to the patch; quite on the contrary.
-hpa
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