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Revision 4480e0f9

ID4480e0f924a42e1db8b8cfcac4d0634dd1bb27a0

Added by Markus Armbruster almost 12 years ago

vvfat: Do not clobber the user's geometry

vvfat creates a virtual VFAT filesystem with a certain logical
geometry that depends on its options. It sets the "geometry hint" to
this geometry. It is the only block driver to do this.

The geometry hint is about about physical geometry, and used only by
certain hard disk device models.

vvfat's hint is normally invisible for device models, because
bdrv_open() puts a raw format on top of vvfat's fat protocol. That
raw format is where drive_init() puts the user's geometry (if any),
and where the device model gets it from.

Nobody complained, because the default physical geometry is the same
as vvfat's logical geometry:

opts        LCHS        def. PCHS
                1024,16,63  same
    :32:        1024,16,63  same
    :16:        1024,16,63  same
    :12:          64,16,63  same

Except when you specify :floppy:

opts        LCHS        def. PCHS
       :floppy:   80, 2,36  5,16,63
    :32:floppy:   80, 2,36  5,16,63
    :16:floppy:   80, 2,36  5,16,63
    :12:floppy:   80, 2,18  2,16,63

Silly thing to do for use with a hard disk.

However, the "raw" format can be suppressed by adding an
redundant-looking "format=vvfat" to "file=fat:FOO". Then, vvfat's
hint clobbers the user's geometry, i.e. -drive options cyls, heads,
secs get silently ignored. Don't do that.

No change without format=vvfat. With it, the user's hard disk
geometry (-drive options cyls, heads, secs) is now obeyed, and the
default hard disk geometry with :floppy: now matches the one without
format=vvfat.

Signed-off-by: Markus Armbruster <>
Signed-off-by: Kevin Wolf <>

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