4K-sector drives and Fedora [LWN.net]

4K-sector drives and Fedora

Posted Mar 11, 2010 17:09 UTC (Thu) by msnitzer (subscriber, #57232)
In reply to: 4K-sector drives and Fedora by corbet
Parent article: 4K-sector drives and Linux

Hey Jon,

Not a big deal.. I was just saying that many of the partition tools and others have
already been updated. The "what does it take" to update them is somewhat
moot; as it has been done. Updating LVM was a bit more involved than
mkfs.ext3. Updating virtio and qemu was also somewhat intrusive.

But for those tools that haven't been updated they will either need to use libblkid
(like e2fsprogs does) or use the new "IO topology" block ioctls. Please see this
for more info (contains the specific ioctls and more):
http://people.redhat.com/msnitzer/docs/io-limits.txt

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4K-sector drives and Fedora

Posted Mar 11, 2010 18:47 UTC (Thu) by ricwheeler (subscriber, #4980) [Link]

Thanks for the article!

One thing that seems to have been skipped in the discussion so far is that this is not just an issue with local, 4KB sector drives. The changes we have in the kernel and in the tool chain will help with external arrays which have long had larger internal "sectors" but pretended to have 512 byte sectors like a local disk.

The larger impact of the change is that it should all "just work" if we got all of the bits in place correctly :-)

Testing on a variety of storage hardware from various vendors, without and without DM and MD is really, really interesting right now to help us uncover any bits we did miss.