On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 07:24:31PM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote: > More than a year back, I was the sacrificial Linux person invited to > represent Linux at IDEMA. At that point, I seem to remember that Vista > supported native 4k drives only on data partitions (non-boot) and that > they required a 1MB alignment (no more odd 512 byte sector offsets). I can talk to the folks to confirm, but my understanding is that they are resigned to random unaligned 4k writes because Windows does this. When I told them that we tried very hard to do write coalescing and filesystems could be made to understand to align things on RAID stripe boundaries, they seemed surprised (because Windows doesn't do this). So as far as I know 4k alignment is all they need. And this is something very simple we can do, either in distribution installers forcibly sending a configuration parameter to the partition editors, or changing the partition editors to have better defaults, or changing the kernel to report different fantasy geometries if we can't find a valid MBR partition label. Also, they seem to be talking about 2011 for the 4k sector rollout, which means Windows 7.... > I don't think that this is a hard problem to fix, just get someone to > give us drives and we can work through the details (grub, etc)... I don't think it's a hard problem either. My thinking though was that if we start making changes now, then we can avoid the rush for the enterprise distro's 2 years from now. :-) And the changes really seem to be quite trivial, and low risk; simply making the partitions to be appropriately aligned and then running in Windows compatibility mode should be quite simple. - Ted -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe util-linux-ng" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
