From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Vladislav Bolkhovitin Subject: Re: tools support for non-512 byte sector sizes Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 09:51:03 +0400 Message-ID: <48900147.7030106@vlnb.net> References: <488F524F.6020905@redhat.com> <20080729182611.GB24924@parisc-linux.org> <1217356645.6103.48.camel@localhost.localdomain> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=KOI8-R; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <1217356645.6103.48.camel@localhost.localdomain> Sender: linux-scsi-owner@vger.kernel.org To: James Bottomley Cc: Matthew Wilcox , Ric Wheeler , linux-scsi@vger.kernel.org, linux-ide@vger.kernel.org, Jim Meyering , linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, Martin Petersen , Jeff Garzik , Matt Domsch List-Id: linux-ide@vger.kernel.org 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@vger.kernel.org > More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html >