>>>>> "Ted" == Theodore Tso <tytso@xxxxxxx> writes: >> Because of 63-sector legacy problems a bunch of ATA vendors will >> initially ship 512/4096 drives that are not naturally aligned. >> I.e. logical sector 63 will be aligned on a 4KB hardware sector >> boundary to overcome the misaligned default partitioning. >> Ted> Are we *sure* that this is what they plan to be doing? I have asked my contacts to verify. That was the plan as of last October. Ted> Is there a way we can query the hardware to find out for sure what Ted> drives are doing what? Yep. And with my patches the appropriate alignment is exposed in sysfs for each block device. Hardware workarounds for DOS partition table brain damage have existed for a long time. On a lot of RAID arrays you have to pick a LUN personality. And by choosing DOS/Windows/Linux you often align sector 63 to the internal RAID chunk size. I'm working with several RAID vendors to make sure they set the right alignment offset when they do that. That isn't currently the case. The alignment knobs only recently made their appearance in the spec to accommodate the 4KB sector transition. Ted> I'll note that Vista starts all new partitions at the 1MB boundary, Ted> so its filesystems will be naturally aligned. Maybe. See above. -- Martin K. Petersen Oracle Linux Engineering -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
