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From: | Sam Eiderman |
Subject: | Re: [Qemu-block] [QEMU] [PATCH v2 0/8] Add Qemu to SeaBIOS LCHS interface |
Date: | Thu, 13 Jun 2019 14:45:51 +0300 |
See below
I’m not talking about the vmware case here. If you introduce MBR guessing into SeaBIOS and change its default behaviour you risk making operating systems such as Windows XP / 2003 / 2000 created on QEMU to not work anymore. Example: Consider a Windows XP that works with the following geometries on standard QEMU/SeaBIOS today: Disk is very large, therefore INT13 AH=02: 255 heads, 63 spt Now you change SeaBIOS to guess from the MBR. In some cases the MBR guess can be incorrect so now SeaBIOS will guess: 255 heads, 62 spt The guest no longer boots with these geometries and you broke compatibility. Can there be a guest that will fail the MBR in such a way? Yes. Look at the following MBR partition table of a Windows XP guest in our production environment: Disk size in sectors: 16777216 Binary (only one partition 16 bytes): 80 01 01 00 07 fe ff ff 3f 00 00 00 d5 ea ff 00 Start: (0, 1, 1, 63) End: (1023, 254, 63, 16771859) As can be easily seen, any MBR guessing algorithm should guess: 255 heads (since a value of 254 appears), 63 spt (since a value of 63 appears) Turns out that this image does not work with 255, 63 but actually requires 16 heads, 63 spt to boot. So relying on MBR partitions alone is not always enough and sometimes manual intervention is required. (VMware solves this by specifying 16 heads, 63 spt in the descriptor file and overrides its default guessing algorithm which also fails here) (By the way this is not a VMware specific problem, the disk itself was imported to VMware in a P2V scenario, so that probably explains why the ddb.geometry.bios* values appear in the VMDK in the first place)
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