Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2011 10:54:38 -0700 From: Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com> To: Kevin Oberman <kob6558@gmail.com> Cc: "freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Stable" <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Status of support for 4KB disk sectors Message-ID: <E8F5CB22-21D5-4AF9-A690-1DB99D31F4CC@mac.com> In-Reply-To: <CAN6yY1uaEwoEhEuoTNPqzywRaCPEvcLY-ddyFRUV00FcBDU1BA@mail.gmail.com> References: <CAN6yY1uaUqk2ifiNViJyMFJWf60a4DmCiVs3Z=--_TjtzseABQ@mail.gmail.com> <20110718234124.GA5626@icarus.home.lan> <CAN6yY1uaEwoEhEuoTNPqzywRaCPEvcLY-ddyFRUV00FcBDU1BA@mail.gmail.com>
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On Jul 18, 2011, at 11:04 PM, Kevin Oberman wrote: > I just wish FreeBSD had some decent documentation on such a fundamental > operation. Fortunately there are some pretty good articles folks have > written, but they did leave me with several questions. Is there something in FreeBSD which is preventing you from using the drive's native DEV_BSIZE of 4096 bytes, or is it that the drive claims to have a physical block size of 512 bytes when it is really 4k? Except for a PC BIOS maybe wanting a 512-byte boot sector, there shouldn't be anything magical about that sector size. Unix operating systems like SunOS 3 and NEXTSTEP would happily run with a DEV_BSIZE of 1024 or larger-- they'd boot fine off of optical media using 2048-byte sectors, for example, and some of the early 1990's era SCSI hard drives supported low-level reformatting to a different sector size like 1024 or 2048 bytes. Regards, -- -Chuck
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