Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 22 Jan 2014 09:58:46 -0500 | From | Ric Wheeler <> | Subject | Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] really large storage sectors - going beyond 4096 bytes |
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On 01/22/2014 09:34 AM, Mel Gorman wrote: > On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 09:10:48AM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote: >> On 01/22/2014 04:34 AM, Mel Gorman wrote: >>> On Tue, Jan 21, 2014 at 10:04:29PM -0500, Ric Wheeler wrote: >>>> One topic that has been lurking forever at the edges is the current >>>> 4k limitation for file system block sizes. Some devices in >>>> production today and others coming soon have larger sectors and it >>>> would be interesting to see if it is time to poke at this topic >>>> again. >>>> >>> Large block support was proposed years ago by Christoph Lameter >>> (http://lwn.net/Articles/232757/). I think I was just getting started >>> in the community at the time so I do not recall any of the details. I do >>> believe it motivated an alternative by Nick Piggin called fsblock though >>> (http://lwn.net/Articles/321390/). At the very least it would be nice to >>> know why neither were never merged for those of us that were not around >>> at the time and who may not have the chance to dive through mailing list >>> archives between now and March. >>> >>> FWIW, I would expect that a show-stopper for any proposal is requiring >>> high-order allocations to succeed for the system to behave correctly. >>> >> I have a somewhat hazy memory of Andrew warning us that touching >> this code takes us into dark and scary places. >> > That is a light summary. As Andrew tends to reject patches with poor > documentation in case we forget the details in 6 months, I'm going to guess > that he does not remember the details of a discussion from 7ish years ago. > This is where Andrew swoops in with a dazzling display of his eidetic > memory just to prove me wrong. > > Ric, are there any storage vendor that is pushing for this right now? > Is someone working on this right now or planning to? If they are, have they > looked into the history of fsblock (Nick) and large block support (Christoph) > to see if they are candidates for forward porting or reimplementation? > I ask because without that person there is a risk that the discussion > will go as follows > > Topic leader: Does anyone have an objection to supporting larger block > sizes than the page size? > Room: Send patches and we'll talk. >
I will have to see if I can get a storage vendor to make a public statement, but there are vendors hoping to see this land in Linux in the next few years. I assume that anyone with a shipping device will have to at least emulate the 4KB sector size for years to come, but that there might be a significant performance win for platforms that can do a larger block.
Note that windows seems to suffer from the exact same limitation, so we are not alone here with the vm page size/fs block size entanglement....
ric
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