Subject: Re: tools support for non-512 byte sector sizes
From: James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>
To: rwheeler@redhat.com
Cc: "Martin K. Petersen" <martin.petersen@oracle.com>,
       Matthew Wilcox <matthew@wil.cx>, linux-scsi@vger.kernel.org,
       linux-ide@vger.kernel.org, Jim Meyering <jim@meyering.net>,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org>,
       Matt Domsch <Matt_Domsch@Dell.com>,
       FUJITA Tomonori <fujita.tomonori@lab.ntt.co.jp>
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Date: Tue, 29 Jul 2008 13:56:14 -0500
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On Tue, 2008-07-29 at 14:54 -0400, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> Martin K. Petersen wrote:
> >>>>>> "James" == James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com> writes:
> >>>>>>             
> >
> > James> The problem, which ata_ram also suffers, is that the tools we
> > James> most need to test are the ones for manipulating non volatile
> > James> characteristics (like partition tables).  We'd really like the
> > James> disk contents to survive reboot for this ...
> >
> > Yeah, I should add that I wanted persistence too.  I went through a
> > whole stack (well, 5-6 or so) fibre channel drives from various
> > vendors and attempted to low-level format them to 4KB sectors.  Most
> > of them laughed in my face.  One of them tried to comply and
> > irreparably confused its firmware in the process.
> >
> > Just yesterday I received a couple of prototype drives in the mail.
> > I'll ask the vendor whether they support 4KB and if so I'll give them
> > a whirl.
> >   
> Isn't this a great use case for a SCSI target device where our target 
> can be a software disk on a remote host? What is missing for us to put 
> something like that together?

Technically nothing.  Tomo should already have one for the STGT test
infrastructure (I've cc'd him).

James


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