Re: hd_geometry question.

From: Martin Schwidefsky (schwidefsky@de.ibm.com)
Date: Tue Jul 02 2002 - 04:16:06 EST


>About a partition one wants to know start and length.
>About a full disk one wants to know size, and perhaps a (fake) geometry.
>
>The vital partition data cannot depend on obscure hardware info.
>So, the units used must be well-known. Earlier, everything was in
>512-byte sectors, but there are a few places where that is inconvenient
>or unnatural, and now that one has more than 2^32 sectors and 64 bits
>are needed anyway, things are measured in bytes.
>
>That the start field comes with the HDIO_GETGEO ioctl and the size with
>the BLKGETSIZE ioctl is due to history. Both are given in 512-byte sectors.
>BLKGETSIZE64 gives bytes.

Just to make sure I got that right, HDIO_GETGEO delivers a FAKE geometry
based on the assumption that the sector size is 512 bytes ?

blue skies,
   Martin

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