On 26.06.19 14:39, Sam Eiderman wrote:
v1:
Non-standard logical geometries break under QEMU.
A virtual disk which contains an operating system which depends on logical geometries (consistent values being reported from BIOS INT13 AH=08) will most likely break under QEMU/SeaBIOS if it has non-standard logical geometries - for example 56 SPT (sectors per track). No matter what QEMU will guess - SeaBIOS, for large enough disks - will use LBA translation, which will report 63 SPT instead.
In addition we can not enforce SeaBIOS to rely on phyiscal geometries at all. A virtio-blk-pci virtual disk with 255 phyiscal heads can not report more than 16 physical heads when moved to an IDE controller, the ATA spec allows a maximum of 16 heads - this is an artifact of virtualization.
By supplying the logical geometies directly we are able to support such "exotic" disks.
We will use fw_cfg to do just that.
(From a block perspective,) I didn’t find anything too bad, so:
Acked-by: Max Reitz mreitz@redhat.com