On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 05:40:54PM -0500, jim owens wrote: > Christoph Hellwig wrote: > >On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 05:26:34PM -0500, jim owens wrote: > >>My understanding is the current 4k drives normally operate in > >>512 byte read/write access mode unless you set them to run > >>as 4k only. > >> > >>In 512 byte mode, they buffer internally on writes. It is probably > >>just as safe as any other drive on a power hit, as in anything may > >>be trash. > >> > >>btrfs read of 512 byte boundaries is safe because we only write > >>in 4k boundaries (hopefully we can detect and align on the drive). > > > >There are drives that still have 512 byte logical, but 4k physical > >blocks, this includes all the consumer (SATA) drives. You can also > >have drives with 4k physical and logical block size, this includes > >many S/390 DASD devices, and also samples of enterprise SAS drives. > > > >The logical block size is the addressing limit for the OS, so your > >above scenario is correct for the 512 bye logical / 4k physical > >devices, but not the 4k logical / 4k physical devices. Nevermind > >other corner cases like 2k block size CD-ROM which could in theory > >be used in a read-only btrfs filesystem (very unlikely, but..). > > > >So no, you really can't go under the bdev_logical_block_size() > >advertized by the device, and that may as well be over 512 bytes. > > I agree fully with all of that. What I did not say is the > current btrfs direct IO code does not go below the drive > logical block size. If the drive says 4k and the user tries > to read any other multiple, the code returns an error. > > The confusion is that detection occurs only when I go to > build the bio because it is there that I know the drive > and extract the drive block size to check alignment. > > We only know what drive is being used when we have the > extent info because we can have multiple drives in btrfs. > > The early 512 check is the idiot check. The 512 check just needs to be replaced with a number that we store during device scan. We won't try to bend physics w/4k drives ;) -chris -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
