Re: tools support for non-512 byte sector sizes

[Vladislav Bolkhovitin]

James Bottomley wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-07-29 at 12:26 -0600, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> > On Tue, Jul 29, 2008 at 01:24:31PM -0400, Ric Wheeler wrote:
> > > Jim pinged me about the use case for having our tool chain (parted 
> > > specifically) support devices with non-512 bytes sectors.
> > Matt Domsch spoke with me about this at OLS.  I took that opportunity,
> > and I'll take this one, to pimp my ata-ram driver which allows you to
> > alter the sector sizse to whatever you want:
> >
> > http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/willy/misc.git;a=shortlog;h=ata-ram
> >
> > I'll admit to having not tested it with anything other than 512, but it
> > ought to support 4096 byte sectors just fine.  I haven't looked at what
> > would be required to support 520-byte sectors.
>
> scsi_debug does exactly the same thing, so it reports anything you tell
> it (Martin Petersen actually added this so he could test with 4k
> sectors).
>
> The problem, which ata_ram also suffers, is that the tools we most need
> to test are the ones for manipulating non volatile characteristics (like
> partition tables).  We'd really like the disk contents to survive reboot
> for this ...

SCST (http://scst.sf.net) fully supports non-512 bytes sectors up to 
4096. Available target drivers for transports: software iSCSI, FC, 
InfiniBand SRP, parallel SCSI, SAS (not much tested, because of lack of 
hardware). With VDISK dev handler you can use files as a backstorage.

I personally for a long time have been working with 4K sectors, because 
it's better for performance, but so far found the only tool, which 
doesn't support them: disktest.

> James
>
>
> --
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-scsi" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
--
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at  http://www.tux.org/lkml/