New GEOM module: geom_xboxhd

[Ed Schouten]

Hello,

One of the problems of the current FreeBSD/xbox port is that it's not
possible to install FreeBSD, while leaving the existing software alone.
The Microsoft Xbox uses a custom disk layout which doesn't have a
partition table format which specifies the geometries. All partitions
are hardcoded.

The last partition on the Xbox always has a variable size, because not
all harddisks have the same size. The partition will never be bigger
than 4895MB, so on Xboxes with a bigger harddisk, the Xbox software
won't touch everything after 7645MB, which gives us space to install
FreeBSD ;-)

Linux has an evil hack to work around this; they have modified the x86
partition table code to start at 7645MB and create some device nodes
(hda51 to hda55) which represent the partitions from the Xbox itself. I
just wrote a GEOM module that just generates ad0s1 to ad0s5 and when the
disk is big enough an ad0s6.

My Xbox isn't capable anymore to deal with original Xbox harddisks
anymore, so I tested it on my desktop with a snapshot of an Xbox
harddisk from a friend of mine (thanks Laurens!).

I've placed the code in a Git repository, which can be viewed online:

	http://g-rave.nl/gitweb?p=geom_xboxhd;a=tree

Yours,
-- 
 Ed Schouten <ed at fxq.nl>
 WWW: http://g-rave.nl/
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