freebsd stable - May 2008 - Why does sysinstall still limits cylinders to 65535?

Hello,

I have been struglling with sysinstall, attempting to make it handle
the geometry of some large SATA drives. After a lot of effort I
decided to stop suffering and modified the program in order to
circumvent the outdated limit of 65535 cylinders (see attached patch).
I'm thinking about submitting a PR with a change request but I'd like
to get some additional opinions first. I did not test it in "batch"
mode, so it would be great if any kind soul did this.

Thanks in advance for your comments and/or suggestions.

-- 
Carlos A. M. dos Santos
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On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 11:52:06PM -0300, Carlos A. M. dos Santos
wrote:
> I have been struglling with sysinstall, attempting to make it handle
> the geometry of some large SATA drives. After a lot of effort I
> decided to stop suffering and modified the program in order to
> circumvent the outdated limit of 65535 cylinders (see attached patch).
> I'm thinking about submitting a PR with a change request but I'd
like
> to get some additional opinions first. I did not test it in
"batch"
> mode, so it would be great if any kind soul did this.
Carlos, bottom line is to simply ignore the geometry warning you see.

For others...

This is just added evidence that the humongous warning spit out during
sysinstall's fdisk is confusing users (many taking it very seriously
when there's really no problem at all).

I think this is the third time someone's brought this up in the past
couple months...

-- 
| Jeremy Chadwick                                jdc at parodius.com |
| Parodius Networking                       http://www.parodius.com/ |
| UNIX Systems Administrator                  Mountain View, CA, USA |
| Making life hard for others since 1977.              PGP: 4BD6C0CB |

On Mon, May 26, 2008 at 3:24 AM, Jeremy Chadwick <koitsu@freebsd.org>
wrote:
> On Sun, May 25, 2008 at 11:52:06PM -0300, Carlos A. M. dos Santos wrote:
>> I have been struglling with sysinstall, attempting to make it handle
>> the geometry of some large SATA drives. After a lot of effort I
>> decided to stop suffering and modified the program in order to
>> circumvent the outdated limit of 65535 cylinders (see attached patch).
>> I'm thinking about submitting a PR with a change request but
I'd like
>> to get some additional opinions first. I did not test it in
"batch"
>> mode, so it would be great if any kind soul did this.
>
> Carlos, bottom line is to simply ignore the geometry warning you see.
>
> For others...
>
> This is just added evidence that the humongous warning spit out during
> sysinstall's fdisk is confusing users (many taking it very seriously
> when there's really no problem at all).
>
> I think this is the third time someone's brought this up in the past
> couple months...
Sorry if I sound annoying but nobody else answered. I still believe
that something must be done to fix sysinstall, so I'm asking you
(where "you" means the "others" in Jeremy's message) to
provide some
additional feedback. Please fill-in the dots in one or more of the
following options:

1. We can not make such change sysinstall because ...

2. Your patch is not correct/sufficient. I would be better if ...

3. Please submit a PR. It will momentarily be reviewed by ...

4. Give up. Nobody here cares about this issue.

Thanks in advance.

-- 
Carlos A. M. dos Santos