> One interesting counter example is a smaller write than a full page - say 512 > bytes out of 4k. > > If we need to do a read-modify-write and it just so happens that 1 of the 7 > sectors we need to read is flaky, will this "look" like a write failure? The current core kernel code can't handle propogating sub-page sized errors up to the file system layers (there is nowhere in the page cache to store 'part of this page is missing'). This is a long standing (four year plus) problem with CD-RW support as well. For ATA we can at least retrieve the true media sector size now, which may be helpful at the physical layer but the page cache would need to grow some brains to do anything with it. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
