Date: Sun, 7 Nov 2004 15:52:04 -0600
From: Matt Domsch <Matt_Domsch@dell.com>
To: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>, greg@kroah.com
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: EFI partition code broken..
Message-ID: <20041107215204.GB3169@lists.us.dell.com>
References: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0411070959560.2223@ppc970.osdl.org> <Pine.LNX.4.58.0411071128240.24286@ppc970.osdl.org>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline
In-Reply-To: <Pine.LNX.4.58.0411071128240.24286@ppc970.osdl.org>
User-Agent: Mutt/1.4.1i
Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org
Content-Length: 1401
Lines: 32

On Sun, Nov 07, 2004 at 11:30:18AM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> There's a few reports of various USB storage devices locking up. The last 
> one was an iPod, but there's apparently others too.
> 
> The reason? They are unhappy if you access them past the end, and they 
> seem to have problems reporting their true size.
> 
> And the EFI partitioning code will happily just blindly try to access the 
> last sector, because that's where the EFI partition is. Boom. Immediately 
> dead iPod/whatever.

Another train of thought, and copying gregkh for inspiration.  Is there
any way to know which devices lie about their size, and fix that with
quirk code in the device discovery routines?  While I can fix
fs/partitions/efi.c to not to always do I/O to the end of the
purported size of the device, userspace and 'dd' can't.  If we could
quirk down the reported size for devices known to lie, then everything
which uses that value wouldn't have to have its own rules for such.

Thanks,
Matt

-- 
Matt Domsch
Sr. Software Engineer, Lead Engineer
Dell Linux Solutions linux.dell.com & www.dell.com/linux
Linux on Dell mailing lists @ http://lists.us.dell.com
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/