Re: [PATCH] make kernel ignore bogus partitions

[Jan Engelhardt]

>
>Perhaps the kernel should try reading beyond the ends of disks when it 
>detects them, so that it can determine if there's actually available 
>storage there, and automatically increase the size if there is? Or, at 
>least, it could check whether the medium actually goes out to the point 
>the partition table implies, and suppress the I/O error if the disk 
>actually ends where it claims to.
>
Sounds like a good idea. In fact, I had miscreated a sun disklabel on a 
disk because it has a slightly different notion of cylinders that I am used 
to from x86; IOW:

dmesg:
SCSI device sdb: 35378533 512-byte hdwr sectors (18114 MB)

fdisk:
Disk /dev/sdb (Sun disk label): 19 heads, 248 sectors, 7200 rpm
7508 cylinders, 2 alternate cylinders, 7510 physical cylinders
0 extra sects/cyl, interleave 1:1
(should have been 7506 cyl, 2 alt, 7508 phys)

And Solaris rightfully barfs about it when scanning disks,
because 7510*19*248 > 35378533. Linux keeps silent,
and I am not sure if I have a silent data corruption there (currently not 
as it seems).
(Since it's just a test box ATM, it's not critical.)


Jan Engelhardt
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