Messages in this thread | | | Date | Tue, 25 Mar 2008 09:34:16 -0400 | From | Mark Lord <> | Subject | Re: What to do about the 2TB limit on HDIO_GETGEO ? |
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Linus Torvalds wrote: > > On Mon, 24 Mar 2008, Mark Lord wrote: >> The return value uses "unsigned long", >> which on a 32-bit system limits drive offsets to 2TB. > > One relevant question is: does anybody seriously care about the > combination of "32 bit" and "huge modern drives" any more? > > Sure, we can add a 64-bit version that ends up being used only on 32-bit > systems, but quite frankly, I think the solution here is to just ignore > the issue and see if anybody really even cares. > > Because quite frankly, the kind of people who buy modern 2TB drives > generally don't then couple them to CPU's that are five+ years old. ..
Yeah. Except Dell will undoubtedly have them in desktops within 2 years, and tons of people (myself included) still use 32-bit (K)Ubuntu on our systems, simply for the better binary compatibility that it is perceived to give with things like browser plugins and stuff.
Using sysfs interfaces might be a good alternative, if they were easier to use, but drives are not directly accessible there using the dev_t value from stat(2).
Instead, software has to search everything inside /sys/block/ looking for a "dev" file whose contents match, rather than just trying to access something like this:
/sys/block/8:1/start or /sys/block/majors/8/minors/1/start
Or any one of a number of similar ways to arrange it.
Cheers
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