The patch to identify AIX disks and ignore them has caused at least one
machine to fail to find the root partition on 2.6.19. The patch is:
http://lkml.org/lkml/2006/7/31/117
The problem is some disk formatters do not blow away the first 4 bytes
of the disk. If the disk we are installing to used to have AIX on it,
then the first 4 bytes will still have IBMA in EBCDIC.
The install in question was debian etch. Im not sure what the best fix
is, perhaps the AIX detection code could check more than the first 4
bytes.
The whole partition info for primary partitions is in this block:
dd if=/dev/sdb count=$(( 4 * 16 )) bs=1 skip=$(( 0x1be ))
All other data do not matter, beside the 0x55aa marker at the end of the
first block.
Signed-off-by: Olaf Hering <olh@suse.de>
Cc: OGAWA Hirofumi <hirofumi@mail.parknet.co.jp>
Cc: Anton Blanchard <anton@samba.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Some partitioning systems create special partitions that
span the entire disk. One example are Sun partitions, and
this whole-disk partition exists to tell the firmware the
extent of the entire device so it can load the boot block
and do other things.
Such partitions should not be treated as normal partitions,
because all the other partitions overlap this whole-disk one.
So we'd see multiple instances of the same UUID etc. which
we do not want. udev and friends can thus search for this
'whole_disk' attribute and use it to decide to ignore the
partition.
Signed-off-by: Fabio Massimo Di Nitto <fabbione@ubuntu.com>
Signed-off-by: David S. Miller <davem@davemloft.net>
The on-disk data structures from AIX are not known, also the filesystem
layout is not known. There is a msdos partition signature at the end of
the first block, and the kernel recognizes 3 small (and overlapping)
partitions. But they are not usable. Maybe the firmware uses it to find
the bootloader for AIX, but AIX boots also if the first block is cleared.
This is the content of the partition table:
# dd if=/dev/sdb count=$(( 4 * 16 )) bs=1 skip=$(( 0x1be )) | xxd
0000000: 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 ................
0000010: 80ff ffff 41ff ffff 1b11 0000 381b 0000 ....A.......8...
0000020: 00ff ffff 41ff ffff 0211 0000 1900 0000 ....A...........
0000030: 80ff ffff 41ff ffff 1b11 0000 381b 0000 ....A.......8...
Handle the whole disk as empty disk.
This fixes also YaST which compares the output from parted (and formerly
fdisk) with /proc/partitions. fdisk recognizes the AIX label since a long
time, SuSE has a patch for parted to handle the disk label as unknown.
dmesg will look like this:
sda: [AIX] unknown partition table
Tested on an IBM B50 with AIX V4.3.3.
Signed-off-by: Olaf Hering <olh@suse.de>
Cc: Albert Cahalan <acahalan@gmail.com>
Cc: OGAWA Hirofumi <hirofumi@mail.parknet.co.jp>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
This patch makes the following changes to the msdos partition code:
- remove CONFIG_NEC98_PARTITION leftovers
- make parse_bsd static
This patch was already ACK'ed by Andries Brouwer.
Signed-off-by: Adrian Bunk <bunk@stusta.de>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
This change from March 3rd causes the partition parsing code to ignore
partitions which have a signature byte of zero. Turns out that more people
have such partitions than we expected, and their device numbering is coming up
wrong in post-2.6.11 kernels.
So revert the change while we think about the problem a bit more.
Cc: Andries Brouwer <Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Initial git repository build. I'm not bothering with the full history,
even though we have it. We can create a separate "historical" git
archive of that later if we want to, and in the meantime it's about
3.2GB when imported into git - space that would just make the early
git days unnecessarily complicated, when we don't have a lot of good
infrastructure for it.
Let it rip!
Olaf Hering