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From: Tejun Heo on 24 Jul 2010 06:00
Hello,

I've been playing with a SATA 2.5T drive and things don't look too
bad. All four controllers I've tested worked fine and the driver and
kernel worked just fine. Even BIOSes don't seem too bad. At least
the two boards I tested (both about three years old) didn't have much
problem recognizing upto 2TiB and could access and boot fine although
I'm fairly sure there will be BIOSes which would behave erratically.

I also tested installing w/ openSUSE 11.3 and it worked fine. It
automatically chose GPT and alignment and everything just worked (tm).
I think the situation shouldn't be too different for any distro which
uses up-to-date parted.

The only problem is that everything which is necessary for booting
needs to be located below 2TiB limit. Please note that this is much
stricter restriction than the 128GiB limit we had due to LBA28. That
limit was caused by BIOSes using LBA28 and vendors could and did
update and be done with it in many cases. However, 2TiB limit is
inherent in the BIOS programming interface and currently the only way
to overcome it is using a completely different BIOS interface (EFI,
that is). Vendors are not likely to introduce EFI for already
released products although they're much more likely to release updates
so that BIOSes can access upto 2TiB if they don't work already. We'll
be stuck with 2TiB limit on much more configurations for longer period
of time.

So, distro installers need to try to locate everything needed for
bootstrapping below 2TiB limit (ie. a dedicated boot partition below
the limit). Drives > 2TiB aren't on the market yet but aren't too far
away. Let's make sure things will be ready by the next distro release
cycle.

Thanks.

--
tejun
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From: Henrique de Moraes Holschuh on 24 Jul 2010 08:30
Message forwarded to debian-boot(a)lists.debian.org, and also to the Debian
BTS, package "debian-installer", bug #590169.

Thanks for the analysis and advice, Tejun.

--
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them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh
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From: Alex Buell on 24 Jul 2010 08:40
On Sat, 2010-07-24 at 11:58 +0200, Tejun Heo wrote:
> The only problem is that everything which is necessary for booting
> needs to be located below 2TiB limit. Please note that this is much
> stricter restriction than the 128GiB limit we had due to LBA28. That
> limit was caused by BIOSes using LBA28 and vendors could and did
> update and be done with it in many cases. However, 2TiB limit is
> inherent in the BIOS programming interface and currently the only way
> to overcome it is using a completely different BIOS interface (EFI,
> that is). Vendors are not likely to introduce EFI for already
> released products although they're much more likely to release updates
> so that BIOSes can access upto 2TiB if they don't work already. We'll
> be stuck with 2TiB limit on much more configurations for longer period
> of time.

The only thing that would please me no end with newer replacements for
BIOS is the ability to have 4k boot sectors. Imagine what we can do with
4k what we can't do with 512 bytes.
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http://www.munted.org.uk

One very high maintenance cat living here.
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From: Valdis.Kletnieks on 24 Jul 2010 10:00
On Sat, 24 Jul 2010 13:36:06 BST, Alex Buell said:

> The only thing that would please me no end with newer replacements for
> BIOS is the ability to have 4k boot sectors. Imagine what we can do with
> 4k what we can't do with 512 bytes.

Are you saying that 4K sectors have some special nice implications for the boot
process, or that the boot process is the last major hangup to fully supporting
a device with 4K sectors, which would give us an 8X boost in capacity on all
the codepaths that work via sector humbers? I suspect you mean the latter, but
it's early in the morning still.. ;)

As a side consideration - moving from 512 to 4K moves the associated limit from
2 TiB to 16 TiB. Given the current rate of device density increase, how much
time will that buy us, and what do we do then?

From: Yuhong Bao on 24 Jul 2010 14:50

> However, 2TiB limit is
> inherent in the BIOS programming interface and currently the only way
> to overcome it is using a completely different BIOS interface (EFI,
> that is).
Nope, look at the Int13 extensions, it already support 64-bit LBA.

Yuhong Bao

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