[RFC] Remove requirement of alignment to track from MBR scheme

[Marcel Moolenaar]

On May 23, 2011, at 2:55 AM, Andrey V. Elsukov wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Since after r221788 many people report about lost of access to their
> MBR partitions, i prepared new patch:
> 	
> 	http://people.freebsd.org/~ae/mbr_geometry.diff
> 
> It removes from GEOM_PART_MBR constraints to alignment to track.
> Now it is possible to create MBR partitions with exactly specified
> start offset and size, and they will not be recalculated by kernel.

Ok, slow down.

While I don't mind that we remove the track alignment when we create
MBR partitions, I don't think we should slap another "big" change on
top of the previous "big" change.

Can I ask we first properly revert the changes we made so far just
so that the revision history clearly states that we cannot enforce
track boundaries. Let's also make sure we have the proper fix for
the "negative partition size" problem that started this whole thing.
And *then* we wait a week, just to be sure we let the dust settle.

I think we've had enough rushed and ill thought-out changes going
in already and I can see that not aligning MBR partitions on a track
boundary is potentially perceived as a PITA violation.

Thanks,

-- 
Marcel Moolenaar
marcel at xcllnt.net