Sometimes partitions claim to be larger than the reported capacity of a
disk device. This patch makes the kernel warn about those partitions.
We still permit these patitions to be used. Quoting Andries Brouwer
<Andries.Brouwer@cwi.nl>:
Case 1: The kernel is mistaken about the size of the disk. (There are
commands to clip a disk to a certain capacity, there are jumpers to tell a
disk that it should report a certain capacity etc. Usually this is because
of BIOS bugs. In bad cases the machine will crash in the BIOS and hence fail
to boot if the disk reports full capacity.) In such cases actually accessing
the blocks of the partition may work fine, or may work fine after running an
unclip utility. I wrote "setmax" some years ago precisely for this reason.
Case 2: There was a messy partition table (maybe just a rounding error) but
the actual filesystem on the partition is contained in the physical disk.
Now using the filesystem goes without problem.
Case 3: Both partition and filesystem extend beyond the end of the disk. In
forensic or debugging situations one often uses a copy of the start of a
disk. Now access beyond the end gives an expected I/O error.
Signed-off-by: Mike Miller <mike.miller@hp.com>
Signed-off-by: Stephen Cameron <steve.cameron@hp.com>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Mike Miller
98bd34eaf1