Re: [PATCH RFC] xfs: set block device logical sector size on xfs_buftarg

Christoph Hellwig
2013-11-13T18:56:47Z

On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 12:25:33PM -0600, Eric Sandeen wrote:
> Pure RFC; this might be crazy. Here's the problem I'm trying to solve:
>
> Today, mkfs.xfs will select a 4k sector size for a 4k physical / 512 logical
> drive. (that change was done by me). The thought was that it'd be an
> efficiency gain to not make the drive do the (possible) RMW cycles on
> 512-byte log IO, primarily.
>
> However, now this restricts all DIO to 4k alignment, not the otherwise-
> possible 512.
>
> This came up when qemu-kvm, in cache=none mode, tries to boot off an
> image hosted on such a filesystem, and its bios wants to do a 512 byte
> direct IO read off the disk - it fails.
>
> But I'm wondering - the buftarg's bt_sshift and bt_smask are only used
> in a few places.

No need to mess with kernel code IFF we want to change that, just keep
the sector size at 512 bytes and set a log stripe unit at mkfs time.

I have to admit that I'm not really sure if that's what we really want,
through. A drive that has a larger physical block size will need
read-modify-write cycles internally, which we try to avoid.