Re: tools support for non-512 byte sector sizes

[Ric Wheeler <rwheeler@redhat.com>]

Martin K. Petersen wrote:
>>>>>> "James" == James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com> writes:
>>>>>>             
>
> James> The problem, which ata_ram also suffers, is that the tools we
> James> most need to test are the ones for manipulating non volatile
> James> characteristics (like partition tables).  We'd really like the
> James> disk contents to survive reboot for this ...
>
> Yeah, I should add that I wanted persistence too.  I went through a
> whole stack (well, 5-6 or so) fibre channel drives from various
> vendors and attempted to low-level format them to 4KB sectors.  Most
> of them laughed in my face.  One of them tried to comply and
> irreparably confused its firmware in the process.
>
> 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.
>   
Isn't this a great use case for a SCSI target device where our target 
can be a software disk on a remote host? What is missing for us to put 
something like that together?

ric