On Sun, 11 Aug 2013, Mouse wrote:
What does your support do? Does it let you write over the host protected area? Does it let you extract what's in there?Yes and yes. It simply removes the protection, letting the host see the HPA as what it really is: more space appended to the space advertised to HPA-unaware software.
I don't really like silently appending the host protected area to the unprotected part of the disk. Exposing something that is supposed to be hidden could have unexpected consequences.
I think I'd prefer to present the HPA as a separate device (an ld(4) device, as others have suggested, would be fine), and add some ioctls and atactl commands to query and adjust the sizes of the ordinary and HPA parts of the disk.
--apb (Alan Barrett)