Comment 2 for bug 380138

The patch in question ended up in the kernel as part of the move of all configuration options out of modprobe.d/options to better support a portable udev/kernel configuration. In discussions with those who remeber the history the main issue is that probabally this option should never have been enabled. That it has been enabled in the past makes it hard to turn off without breaking those users who took advantage of it being enabled in the first place. To turn this off we need a transitional plan to prevent us from breaking those affected users.

For the kernel side it looks like we need a third mode for the ignore_hpa option which leaves HPA enabled in the default case. But disables HPA if the partition table on this disk would require it. This would likely trigger when we have partitions which straddle the HPA boundary, and probably only for partition types we are capable of mounting.

The first step here will be to try and determine just how bad the penetration of this issue is. Enabling some direct report when the HPA is present and indicating whether we would have needed to break it for this disk. With a view for targetted testing with this patch.