Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1759161AbYG3RRG (ORCPT ); Wed, 30 Jul 2008 13:17:06 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1754593AbYG3RQw (ORCPT ); Wed, 30 Jul 2008 13:16:52 -0400 Received: from smtp2-g19.free.fr ([212.27.42.28]:41953 "EHLO smtp2-g19.free.fr" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751106AbYG3RQv (ORCPT ); Wed, 30 Jul 2008 13:16:51 -0400 From: Jim Meyering To: Matt Domsch Cc: "Martin K. Petersen" , James Bottomley , Matthew Wilcox , Ric Wheeler , linux-scsi@vger.kernel.org, linux-ide@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Jeff Garzik Subject: Re: tools support for non-512 byte sector sizes In-Reply-To: <20080730135147.GA4513@auslistsprd01.us.dell.com> (Matt Domsch's message of "Wed, 30 Jul 2008 08:51:47 -0500") References: <488F524F.6020905@redhat.com> <20080729182611.GB24924@parisc-linux.org> <1217356645.6103.48.camel@localhost.localdomain> <20080730135147.GA4513@auslistsprd01.us.dell.com> Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 19:16:49 +0200 Message-ID: <87zlnzb8ce.fsf@rho.meyering.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1793 Lines: 35 Matt Domsch wrote: > On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 02:48:31PM -0400, Martin K. Petersen wrote: ... >> 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. > > I have access to disks with native 4KB sectors now too. Would Do they expose that sector size? I.e., does ioctl(fd,BLKSSZGET,&ss) set ss to 4096? I'm interested because I'm preparing GNU Parted's partition table manipulation code (not its FS code) for just that. In particular, now I've heard two stories: - disk makers will eventually sell drives with >512-byte sectors - some disk makers have sort of agreed not to do that, and expect forever to hide the larger underlying sector size behind a virtual 512 (of course, this imposes alignment restrictions, but that's a smaller problem) Even if the latter is the case, we still have to deal with optical and flash, both of which can already have larger sectors. > interested parties be willing to share test plans, so we could be sure > we have coverage wrt correctness: kernel internals, userspace tools like parted, > fdisk, kpartx, apps using O_DIRECT)? Benchmarking winds up being an > NDA activity this early in the game so I don't want the focus of any > joint work to be benchmarks yet. Speaking of O_DIRECT, both dd and shred (both in coreutils), use O_DIRECT, so you could get _some_ coverage just by running shred and experimenting with dd's oflag=direct and iflag=direct options. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/