Future storage technologies and Linux [LWN.net]

Future storage technologies and Linux

Posted Apr 6, 2011 18:38 UTC (Wed) by cmccabe (guest, #60281)
In reply to: Future storage technologies and Linux by neilbrown
Parent article: Future storage technologies and Linux

> That's easy. We want well documented access to the low level device
> features. Any address-translation-layer should be optional at most.

Drive manufacturers could ship drives with a dual interface. The first interface would be a Windows-centric SATA interface, with a block remapping layer and the NTFS and FAT-specific hacks. The second would be a raw interface that let the OS access erase blocks (for flash) or different kinds of storage (for SMR).

The second interface would be popular with people using Linux servers (or desktops), companies building NAS devices, and writing drive diagnostic or defragmentation tools. Those markets aren't as big as the Windows desktop market, but they do exist.

It would be nice to see Red Hat, or Oracle, or some other company with the resources needed to engage with the drive manufacturers about this. Even Apple has a dog in this fight, since they would benefit from such an interface. If nobody comes forward, I think we're in danger of going down a WinModem-like path where every SSD or next-generation drive will be optimized for NTFS and Win7, and other filesystems will perform poorly.

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