[linux-lvm] q: BLOCK_SIZE

Heinz J. Mauelshagen Mauelshagen at sistina.com
Wed Feb 28 12:38:37 UTC 2001


On Tue, Feb 27, 2001 at 01:25:42PM -0700, Andreas Dilger wrote:
> Michael writes:
> > Little question that I already posted here a long time ago.
> > What drawbacks can suffer if one changes BLOCK_SIZE in
> > include/linux/lvm.h from 1024 (or 4096 on S/390) to 512?
> 
> On S/390 it would appear that the DASD block devices have a 4096
> byte sector size.  However, on most other systems there is only
> a 512 byte sector size, so I don't see any reason there would
> be problems with BLOCK_SIZE = 512.
> 
> I think Andrea Arcangeli was complaining about this as well.
> 
> > This is about using lvm with rawio -- on 2.2, rawio wan't
> > work with i/o size be not a multiple of blocksize, while
> > on 2.4 it works.  Or at least this was on Dec-2000.
> > Oh yes, this is about 2.2 kernel and lvm-0.9.
> 
> If it works for you at 512 bytes, leave it then.

Yep.

> Maybe Heinz
> will let us know why it is set to 1024 bytes.

It is basically an approach to support larger LV sizes than 2T :)

Because the Linux kernel supports 2^32 blocks per block minor up to version 2.4,
this is one approach (with tradeoffs for sure) to raise that limit.

With the 4k block size on S/390 DASD devices this means 16T per LV!

Sure: we won't have a satisfying solution before Linux 2.5.

> 
> Cheers, Andreas
> -- 
> Andreas Dilger  \ "If a man ate a pound of pasta and a pound of antipasto,
>                  \  would they cancel out, leaving him still hungry?"
> http://www-mddsp.enel.ucalgary.ca/People/adilger/               -- Dogbert
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-- 

Regards,
Heinz    -- The LVM Guy --

*** Software bugs are stupid.
    Nevertheless it needs not so stupid people to solve them ***

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Heinz Mauelshagen                                 Sistina Software Inc.
Senior Consultant/Developer                       Am Sonnenhang 11
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Mauelshagen at Sistina.com                           +49 2626 141200
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