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Date:      Tue, 2 Nov 1999 17:10:41 -0500 (EST)
From:      Zhihui Zhang <zzhang@cs.binghamton.edu>
To:        freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Granularity of disk I/O
Message-ID:  <Pine.GSO.3.96.991102165830.16585A-100000@sol.cs.binghamton.edu>

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It is said that the granularity of disk I/O is a sector. I read a little
bit of the source code isa/wd.c, which I think is the driver of IDE disks. 
I find out that the disk can perform multi-block I/O sometimes.  Does this
mean the granularity of disk I/O can be multi-sector?  If the disk can
perform DMA, what is the usual DMA size?  Is the granularity the DMA size
in this case?

If a buffer cache is larger than one sector, it should be split into
sectors before I/O.  If an I/O on a buffer fails, can we tell which sector
within that buffer fails?

I am confused with these things and it is probably that my questions are
confusing too. 

Any help or hints are appreciated.

-Zhihui



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