Re: [PATCH 4/4] brd: Request from fdisk 4k alignment

From: Boaz Harrosh
Date: Thu Aug 07 2014 - 11:40:53 EST


On 08/07/2014 06:21 PM, Karel Zak wrote:
<>
>
> fdisk uses physical sector size or minimal I/O size (greater value wins)
>

OK

>> I was trying to play with the heads, sectors, cylinders; values but none I tried
>
> don't play with CHS, that's waste of time and it's completely ignored
> by fdisk by default
>
>> would cause an alignment of 4k, not even of the first partition start.
>>
>> Please advise what I can do?
>
> IMHO you're right with your patch (alignment offset is IMHO bad way).
> It's all (brd) about pages, is there any reason to use something else
> for I/O limits?
>
> It would be also nice to set minimal and optimal io size, zero values
> in this case means (for userspace) that the device does not provide
> any I/O information to system. It's normal for old hw disks and then
> we use some built-in defaults, but I don't see a reason to do the
> same for virtual devices.
>

Hi Ross

I have by now read the all code, and Karel also confirms this from fdisk
side. The best for us is the use of "physical sector size" but with
our "minimal I/O size" set to 512. The later has actual bad effects in
the Kernel code itself. But the "physical sector size" has no effect on
Kernel code, and actually has a very good affect on fdisk which now works
the way we would like it.

Please send your review-by so Jens can pick these up for mainline

> Karel
>

Thanks
Boaz

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