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From: Christoph Hellwig <hch@infradead.org>
To: Michael Monnerie <michael.monnerie@is.it-management.at>
Cc: xfs@oss.sgi.com
Subject: Re: 4K drives, sectsz=512, bsize=4096
Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2010 06:24:12 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <20100901102412.GF31648@infradead.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <201008300956.21264@zmi.at>

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 09:56:16AM +0200, Michael Monnerie wrote:
> I have 2x 2TB 4K sector drives, joined with LVM to RAID-0. On top of 
> that, I created an XFS, but that has sectsz=512.
> 
> Will there be any real difference if I re-format with sectsz=4096? 
> AFAIK, XFS will do I/O based on block size, so the sector size doesn't 
> do any harm. Is that correct?

As nathan mentioned XFS issues log I/O based on the sector size, and
we do allow direct I/O down to the sector size.  That's two reasons
why or why you don't want a 4096 byte sector size.  Depending on the rmv
implementation of the drive log I/O might be really slow if you set the
512 byte sector size.  On the other hand there's lots of applications
that have the 512 byte alignment for direct I/O hardcoded, which will
break if you have a larger sector size.  That's one of the fun things
4k sector size disks will bring up, especially the real 4k SAS disks
that do not accept any I/O smaller than that.

> A question for LVM: Is there anything I need to tell to LVM to let it 
> know that those are 4K sector drives and I/O should be aligned to that? 
> Drives are reported as 512b sectors, but really are 4K. There seems to 
> be no way to instruct the kernel to see those drives as 4K drives.

If you have a recent enough LVM all metdata is aligned on 1MB boundaries
which will do just fine.

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      parent reply	other threads:[~2010-09-01 10:23 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 12+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2010-08-30  7:56 4K drives, sectsz=512, bsize=4096 Michael Monnerie
2010-08-31 21:01 ` Michael Monnerie
2010-08-31 21:16   ` Eric Sandeen
2010-08-31 22:07     ` Michael Monnerie
2010-08-31 22:15       ` Eric Sandeen
2010-08-31 23:12         ` Michael Monnerie
2010-08-31 22:34       ` Nathan Scott
2010-09-01  5:35         ` Gim Leong Chin
2010-09-01  5:59           ` Nathan Scott
2010-09-01  7:38           ` Michael Monnerie
2010-09-01 10:13             ` Christoph Hellwig
2010-09-01 10:24 ` Christoph Hellwig [this message]

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