Re: [PATCH] blkgetsize64 ioctl

[Ben LaHaise]

On Thu, 30 Aug 2001, Michael E Brown wrote:

> In reference to the ia64 ioctls:  I'm sorry, but disk access APIs that
> don't allow access to the whole disk are what is broken. These ioctls
> would not be necessary if you could actually write to the last sector of
> an odd-sized disk. Have you read the comments surrounding this ioctl?

Were people's heads on backwards when they wrote the ioctl?  Quite simply:
if an ugly hack has to be put in place, put it in the right place.  In
this case, it would have been *trivial* to put the UGLY hack in
fs/block_dev.c and just make read/write transparently able to access the
end of the disk.  No adding crap to the API, and certainly not risking
truely unexpected disk io due to an incorrect ioctl.

		-ben

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