> [...], I wonder if you could attach the HPA area as an additional > partition on the default disklabel, or, if the disk is gpt > partitioned, fake up another partition in the gpt table.
I don't see any reason why not. I'm not sure whether you're proposing that the HPA not be accessible any other way or whether this is just a default. > In any case, I think I would be most comfortable with an > implementation which set the HPA area as read-only and only became > read-write through some user command, perhaps a new command for > atactl(8). That strikes me as a reasonably sensible idea. I'm not sure whether I'd want it to be tacked onto the end of the drive or not (eg, for access through RAW_PART) - I don't like having even one partition with magic semantics and really don't want to add another, but I'm not sure how else to do this. > I realize that from a hardware perspective, you may not be able to > set read-only on the HPA once you enable access to it, but I imagine > you could set that restriction in the wd(4) driver. As I understand it, yes, this, would have to be a NetBSD-imposed limitation. I saw nothing in the doc that makes me think there's any way to enable read but not write access to the HPA. > Have you found any BIOS's that can use this HPA area to load saved > NetBSD rescue images as a way of restoring machines [whose] disks > have been corrupted? No, but I haven't looked, either. I have no idea what would need to be in an HPA in order for an HPA-aware BIOS to do anything useful with it; at a stab-in-the-dark guess, I'd guess that it would depend heavily on the particular BIOS in question - which at that point I'm no longer sure deserves the B part of the name. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML [email protected] / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
