On 3/1/23 16:06, Damien Le Moal wrote:
On 3/2/23 08:50, Bart Van Assche wrote:
On 3/1/23 15:34, Khazhy Kumykov wrote:
- There’s already support in the kernel for marking zones
online/offline and cmr/smr, but this is fixed, not dynamic. Would
there be hiccups with allowing zones to come online/offline while
running?
It may be easier to convince HDD vendors to modify their firmware such
that the conventional and SMR zones are reported to the Linux kernel as
different logical units rather than adding domains & realms support in
the Linux kernel. If anyone else has another opinion, feel free to share
that opinion.
That would not resolve the fact that each unit would still potentially have a
mix of active and inactive areas. Total nightmare to deal with unless a zone API
is also exposed for any user to figure out which zone is active.
That means that we would need to always expose these drives as zoned, using a
very weird zone model as zone domains/zone realms do not fit at all with the
current host-managed model. Lots of places need changes to handle these drives.
This will make things very messy all over.
Do users need all the features that are supported by the domains &
realms model? If not: what I had in mind is to let the HDD expose two
logical units to the operating system that each have a contiguous range
of active zones and hence not to support inactive zones.
Thanks,
Bart.
