Re: [PATCH] biosdisk / open_device() messing up offsets

[Robert Millan]

On Wed, Jun 04, 2008 at 09:47:17PM -0400, Pavel Roskin wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-06-05 at 01:35 +0200, Robert Millan wrote:
> > It seems that open_device() in biosdisk is messing up offsets when
> > accessing partitions.  For example if you try:
> > 
> > grub> hexdump (hd0,1)
> > 
> > in grub-emu, you'll get a message saying lseek failed.  The problem is that
> > it substracts to the sector offset, so all accesses get to wrong data and
> > accessing sector 0 results in underflow.
> > 
> > I would think those lines (see patch) are plainly wrong, but they appear to
> > be very old, and it is strange that this wasn't noticed earlier.  Maybe we
> > have changed behaviour around partition/disk offsets, causing this breakage
> > without noticing?
> 
> The question whether sector is relative to the partition or to the whole
> disk.  From what I see in disk/memdisk.c or it disk/i386/pc/biosdisk.c,
> the sector is relative to the whole disk.  There is no compensation for
> partition offsets.  That's low-level code that doesn't know about
> partitions, and util/biosdisk.c correctly tries to emulate that.
> 
> I guess grub-emu gets it wrong somewhere.

grub-emu itself does nothing about this AFAIK, it just relies on
util/biosdisk.c to do the right thing.

-- 
Robert Millan

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