Bug#485790: generate separate /boot as workaround for buggy LBA48 ?
Package: debian-installer
Severity: normal
This is not a bug about a problem I found, but about a problem I think
can become common with the introduction of >2 TiB disks.
A while ago, I found that bochsbios (the free BIOS used by bochs and qemu)
had an incomplete implementation of LBA48 that caused a fatal error when
attempting to access a disk sector above 2^32:
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1921733&group_id=12580&atid=312580
Although this was fixed, seening how often it happens that we find bugs in
all the variety of BIOS implementations out there, I would expect some of
them will have similar problems.
Of course, there's no way for me to reliably find how common will this be;
perhaps we're lucky and bochsbios is the only one which had this, but I
think it's better to be safe than sorry, so I would propose that D-I avoids
possible problems by generating a separate /boot in the default partition
layout whenever the disk size is above 2 TiB.
Excuse me for not providing a patch, but I'm totally clueless about how the
auto-partitioning heuristics work.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 4.0
APT prefers stable
APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.18-6-amd64
Locale: LANG=ca_AD.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=ca_AD.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Reply to: