Re: 4K drives, sectsz=512, bsize=4096

Eric Sandeen
2010-08-31T22:14:51Z

Michael Monnerie wrote:
> On Dienstag, 31. August 2010 Eric Sandeen wrote:
>> Just be sure your first sector of your top-level block device
>> is 4k aligned, and then yes you'll want to set sector size to 4k
>> so that xfs will do all log IO in 4k blocks as well.
>
> I can only hope LVM does it right, I have no idea how it aligns.
>
>> If you do it right (and especially vs. if you do it wrong) it should
>> be a bit faster if all IOs are 4k aligned on the disk.
>
> And that's what's interesting me: why? Won't XFS do all I/Os at minimum
> for a given block size? Or is it possible XFS does write only a single
> sector? I'd expect the smallest I/O size to be the block size, but it
> seems I'm wrong?

the log can do things on sector size boundaries.

> I guess there's no way to "convert" an existing XFS with
> sectsz=512,bsize=4096 to sectsz=4096,bsize=4096? Maybe that's only a
> flag that can be changed?

I don't think so ...

-Eric