On Tue, Mar 09, 2010 at 09:53:37AM +0300, Michael Tokarev wrote: > Mike Snitzer wrote: > [] > > I've been keeping track of all the pieces in play, have coordinated > > with kzak and jim, and have a summary that offers some amount of macro > > detail (at the end I touch on parted and fdisk): > > > > http://people.redhat.com/msnitzer/docs/io-limits.txt > > What I don't see in this thread and in this document is - any mention > of linux md layer. I think it is the first candidate to test the whole > thing, the easiest and most important one. I mean the alignment and > "recommended I/O size" and all this similar stuff. > > Think of a raid5 array - with all the mentioned good stuff in place > fdisk should figure out to align partitions on the array stripe > boundary, and should do that automatically. And this should be Yes. For userspace there is not a difference between RAID and non-RAID device -- the topology support in kernel provides unified API to all devices. It means we needn't any extra support for RAIDs in fdisk/parted. The userspace tools follow topology data from kernel. The good thing with 1MiB default alignment is that it is usable for usual stripe sizes (for sizes greater than 1MiB we use optimal I/O size). > most easy to debug/test, since the whole thing is controllable > by kernel. I did almost all my tests with scsi_debug or MD RAID0 on scsi_debug. It works as expected. (Note that kernel 2.6.31 has a problem with alignment_offset calculation on stacked devices, so use the latest kernel where the bug is already fixed.) But I didn't tried to use unpartitioned (whole) 4K disks for RAIDs, because scsi_debug does not allow to create more devices (and I don't have a real HW). Some tests are available in util-linux-ng sources: http://git.kernel.org/?p=utils/util-linux-ng/util-linux-ng.git;a=tree;f=tests/ts/fdisk Karel # modprobe scsi_debug dev_size_mb=2500 sector_size=512 physblk_exp=3 [..create partitions...] # fdisk -lcu /dev/sdb Disk /dev/sdb: 2621 MB, 2621440000 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 318 cylinders, total 5120000 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 32768 bytes Disk identifier: 0xb585b0be Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sdb1 2048 1026047 512000 83 Linux /dev/sdb2 1026048 2050047 512000 83 Linux /dev/sdb3 2050048 3074047 512000 83 Linux /dev/sdb4 3074048 4098047 512000 83 Linux # mdadm --create /dev/md8 --level=5 --raid-devices=4 /dev/sdb{1,2,3,4} [...create partitions on the raid...] # fdisk -lcu /dev/md8 Disk /dev/md8: 1572 MB, 1572667392 bytes 2 heads, 4 sectors/track, 383952 cylinders, total 3071616 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes I/O size (minimum/optimal): 65536 bytes / 65536 bytes Disk identifier: 0x1bb6fd8d Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/md8p1 2048 1435647 716800 83 Linux /dev/md8p2 1435648 2869247 716800 83 Linux Check offsets (alignment): # cat /sys/block/sdb/sdb{1,2,3,4}/alignment_offset 0 0 0 0 # cat /sys/block/md8/md8p{1,2}/alignment_offset 0 0 -- Karel Zak <kzak@xxxxxxxxxx> -- 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
