Re: [RFC] blk: increase logical_block_size to unsigned int

Minchan Kim
2017-01-10T22:54:36Z

Hi Jerome, Sergey

On Mon, Jan 09, 2017 at 10:09:20AM -0500, Jerome Marchand wrote:
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Sergey Senozhatsky" <sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com>
> > To: "Minchan Kim" <minchan@kernel.org>
> > Cc: "Jens Axboe" <axboe@kernel.dk>, "Hyeoncheol Lee" <cheol.lee@lge.com>, linux-block@vger.kernel.org,
> > linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, "Andrew Morton" <akpm@linux-foundation.org>, "Sergey Senozhatsky"
> > <sergey.senozhatsky@gmail.com>, "Jerome Marchand" <jmarchan@redhat.com>
> > Sent: Monday, January 9, 2017 3:33:44 PM
> > Subject: Re: [RFC] blk: increase logical_block_size to unsigned int

Remove Robert's mail. It didn't work and don't know his update mail

> >
> > On (01/09/17 14:04), Minchan Kim wrote:
> > > Mostly, zram is used as swap system on embedded world so it want to do IO
> > > as PAGE_SIZE aligned/size IO unit. For that, one of the problem was
> > > blk_queue_logical_block_size(zram->disk->queue, PAGE_SIZE) made overflow
> > > in *64K page system* so [1] changed it to constant 4096.
> > > Since that, partial IO can happen so zram should handle it which makes zram
> > > complicated[2].
> > >
> >
> > I thought that zram partial IO support is there because some file
> > systems cannot cope with large logical_block_size. like FAT, for
> > example. am I wrong?
>
> Yes indeed. When we discussed the patch adding the partial I/O, increasing the
> size of logical_block was considered. The reason we didn't go the easy path was
> that not all block users could handle 64k blocks. FAT is one of them.

I thought it might make some FSes which doesn't support 64K block but
I didn't know what FSes exactly. I thought most popular FSes in linux
may work well(e.g., ext, btrfs, xfs). Thanks for the pointer.
I guess there might be more as well as FAT so let's keep it.

Thanks, Sergey and Jerome!