Re: [PATCH] scsi/sd: Fix size output in MB

Simon Arlott
2008-08-30T21:02:25Z

On 30/08/08 18:45, Matthew Wilcox wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 30, 2008 at 12:24:50PM -0500, James Bottomley wrote:
>> No, this is wrong. By mandated standards the manufacturers are allowed
>> to calculate MB by dividing by 10^6. This is a fiddle to allow them to
>> make their drives look slightly bigger. However, we want the printed
>> information to match that written on the drive, so in this printk, we
>> use the manufacturer standard for calculation (and then do everything
>> else in bytes so we don't have to bother with it ever again).

It's unlikely to match what's on the drive, "1000204886016" isn't 1TB
by any standard.

> I was looking at this code recently because it looks really bizarre when
> you create a half-petabyte filesystem:
>
> $ sudo insmod drivers/ata/ata_ram.ko capacity=1099511627776 preallocate=0
>
> [12095.028093] ata7.00: 1099511627776 sectors, multi 0: LBA48 NCQ (depth 31/32)
> [12095.028093] ata7.00: configured for UDMA/133
> [12095.041915] scsi 7:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA Linux RAM Drive 0.01 PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
> [12095.041915] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] Very big device. Trying to use READ CAPACITY(16).
> [12095.041915] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] 1099511627776 512-byte hardware sectors (562949953 MB)
> [12095.041915] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] Write Protect is off
> [12095.041915] sd 7:0:0:0: [sdc] Write cache: disabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA

This looks useful for testing this... do you have an updated version?

> 1. Avoiding 64-bit divisions is _so_ last decade. We have
> linux/math64.h, we should use it.
>
> 2. We should report in GB or TB when appropriate. The exact definition
> of 'appropriate' is going to vary from person to person. Might I
> suggest that we should report between two and four significant digits.
> eg 9543 MB is ok, 10543 MB should be 10 GB.

I've gone with five digits, it switches to GB at ~98GB, and to TB
at ~98TB etc.

> 3. I hate myself for saying this ... but maybe we should be using the
> horrific MiB/GiB/TiB instead of MB/GB/TB.

Somehow this stuff got into net-tools (ifconfig) too, so I have a
patch to remove it from my systems.

> 4. I've been far too busy to write said patch. Simon, would you mind
> doing the honours?

Sure, patch will follow this email... it can only go as far as 8192EB
and then there's not enough space to store more than 2^64 512-byte
sectors.

(And if you only modify drivers/scsi/sd.c, the kernel make system
won't recompile sd.o!)

--
Simon Arlott