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Date:      Mon, 6 Dec 2010 21:31:39 +0100
From:      Ivan Voras <ivoras@freebsd.org>
To:        John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org>
Cc:        svn-src-head@freebsd.org, svn-src-all@freebsd.org, src-committers@freebsd.org, Pawel Jakub Dawidek <pjd@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: svn commit: r216230 - head/sys/cddl/contrib/opensolaris/uts/common/fs/zfs
Message-ID:  <AANLkTi=Bnkq8sR3j7kq-aKzbk0TEd=kFiyr%2BqeQpzXGc@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <201012061518.49835.jhb@freebsd.org>
References:  <201012061218.oB6CI3oW032770@svn.freebsd.org> <AANLkTine9rGq_cM4ruFXYq=-F7cMXcQAr-zKHuWoQs2z@mail.gmail.com> <20101206195327.GD1936@garage.freebsd.pl> <201012061518.49835.jhb@freebsd.org>

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On 6 December 2010 21:18, John Baldwin <jhb@freebsd.org> wrote:
> On Monday, December 06, 2010 2:53:27 pm Pawel Jakub Dawidek wrote:
>> On Mon, Dec 06, 2010 at 08:35:36PM +0100, Ivan Voras wrote:
>> > Please persuade me on technical grounds why ashift, a property
>> > intended for address alignment, should not be set in this way. If your
>> > answer is "I don't know but you are still wrong because I say so" I
>> > will respect it and back it out but only until I/we discuss the
>> > question with upstream ZFS developers.
>>
>> No. You persuade me why changing ashift in ZFS, which, as the comment
>> clearly states is "device's minimum transfer size" is better and not
>> hackish than presenting the disk with properly configured sector size.
>> This can not only affect disks that still use 512 bytes sectors, but
>> doesn't fix the problem at all. It just works around the problem in ZFS
>> when configured on top of raw disks.
>>
>> What about other file systems? What about other GEOM classes? GELI is
>> great example here, as people use ZFS on top of GELI alot. GELI
>> integrity verification works in a way that not reporting disk sector
>> size properly will have huge negative performance impact. ZFS' ashift
>> won't change that.
>
> I am mostly on your side here, but I wonder if GELI shouldn't prefer the
> stripesize anyway? =C2=A0For example, if you ran GELI on top of RAID-5 I =
imagine it
> would be far more performant for it to use stripe-size logical blocks ins=
tead
> of individual sectors for the underlying media.
>
> The RAID-5 argument also suggests that other filesystems should probably
> prefer stripe sizes to physical sector sizes when picking block sizes, et=
c.

For what it's worth, apparently linux has the concept of "physical"
and "logical" sector sizes (possibly in addition to "stripe size"),
with physical being 4096 and logical 512, for example:

# hdparm -I /dev/sde | grep size
Logical  Sector size:                   512 bytes
Physical Sector size:                  4096 bytes
device size with M =3D 1024*1024:     1430799 MBytes
device size with M =3D 1000*1000:     1500301 MBytes (1500 GB)



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