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Re: blocksizes
On Jan 22, 2010, at 4:09 AM, Michael van Elst wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 07:36:15PM +0900, Izumi Tsutsui wrote:
>>> disk devices are accessed in units of 'blocks', a block can be
>>> any size, however NetBSD makes assumptions in many places that
>>> a block is 512 bytes or DEV_BSIZE bytes which makes it impossible
>>> to use devices with different block sizes.
>>>
>>> IMHO there need to be three different ways to specify block
>>> offsets and block counts:
>>>
>>> 1. in units of blocks of the physical device
>>> 2. in units of blocks of DEV_BSIZE bytes
>>> 3. in bytes
>>>
>>> and we need to establish what units are used where.
>>>
>>>
>>> One possible path to support devices where physical blocks are
>>> not of size DEV_BSIZE would be
>>>
>>> - device drivers use 1.
>>> - wedges use 1.
>>> - the dk driver translates between 1. and 2.
>>> - the buffer system uses 2. and 3.
>>>
>>> Filesystems can be pretty agnostic to this as any multiple of DEV_BSIZE
>>> will work (but slower if not properly aligned to the physical block size).
>>>
>>> The necessary changes are rather small. In particular, dkwedge_info needs
>>> to be extended to keep track of the physical sector size so that the dk
>>> driver can do the transformations.
>>
>>>
>>> Comments?
>>
>> - What's the reason to keep DEV_BSIZE constant? Less necessary changes?
>
> Keeping DEV_SIZE at 512 bytes avoids lots of changes.
So?
> I think about doing block size translations only in the dk driver.
> Changing DEV_BSIZE would break lots of things if you use the
> parent device (like wd) directly and I am sure that we will have
> users of dk and users of the parent devices at the same time.
My feelings are this: when accessing the device through a bdevsw (d_psize or
d_strategy), will refer to daddr_t and will be units of the blocksize of the
device. For block access (aka filesystem) only blocksize that are powers of 2
will supported.
For raw device access, any native blocksize can be used (like 2352 for CD
audio).
The btodb/dbtob macros will need another argument to indicate where the block
size is obtained.
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