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

[Andriy Gapon]

on 24/05/2011 21:12 Marcel Moolenaar said the following:
> With respect to the creation:
> 
> Since out synthesized geometry is not necessarily the same
> as other OSes, we could opt to synthesize a geometry that
> has a track size (= sectors/track) that is a multiple of 8
> (to play nice with 4K sectors), and/or take the stripe
> size of the underlying GEOM into account. This fundamentally
> doesn't change a thing for MBR, but has the side effect of
> achieving some of the goals *and* automatically works for
> EBR as well.
> 
> Thus: rather than hack MBR and forgetting about EBR and other
> schemes, maybe we only have to tweak the geometry synthesis
> to give people what they want without going over board. 

I don't think that currently we do synthesize any geometry in kernel.
I think that we just whatever BIOS/firmware/etc provides to us in some way.

> After
> 9.0 branched, we can do a lot more knowing we have plenty
> of soak time...

I agree in general, but there is one thing I want now/ASAP - ability to use gpart
to create (valid) partitions the way I like it disregarding whatever fake geometry
there might be.  I hate when tools go EDAVE on me.

-- 
Andriy Gapon