Re: [opensuse] SSD alignement-option in partitioner usefull ?

On 4/18/2011 1:28 PM, Andrew Joakimsen wrote:

On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 06:18, David Haller wrote:

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Hello,

On Sun, 17 Apr 2011, Andrew Joakimsen wrote:

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understands what is going on can make sure it is setup properly. There is no formula to convert from cylinders to sectors!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cylinder-head-sector#CHS_to_LBA_mapping

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This issue is also affecting newer/larger hard drives. And these without a doubt have 4kb sectors but everything in opensuse shows 512 bytes!

The _drives_ don't tell their real sector sizes!

# /sbin/hdparm -I /dev/sdb [..] Model Number: SAMSUNG HD204UI [..] LBA48 user addressable sectors: 3907029168 Logical Sector size: 512 bytes Physical Sector size: 512 bytes

This is what the disk tells via the ATA interface. And yes, that is a disk with 4K physical sectors, which is why I partitioned aligned to 4K. There is just no way for Yast or any other tool to know. One could create a database of 4K-disks reporting 512B sectors though.

Right that's what I said basically and hence my proposal that Yast shows disks in the relevant unit of "sectors" and not the antiquated useless term of "cylinders." If you know your disk needs to be aligned to X size sectors you can calculate it yourself and set it up with no hassle.

But in the current arragement, since there's no universal formula to convert cylinders to sectors and yast only shows the former, you need to e.g. boot a live CD, create your partitions with some clunky 3rd party tool and then do your installation.

Hyperbole. I routinely perform manual-custom partitioning and mdadm tasks pre-install right in the regular old ordinary opensuse installer, as part of the same session. If you'r at the console just flip over to one of the other text consoles and use fdsik, sfdisk, parted, mdadm all you want and set up anything you want, then resume the install already in progress. In my case I'm also always remote from the machine so I use a serial text console to boot and ssh for the rest of the install. It that case it's just as easy to either do the low level stuff before launching yast, or in a another ssh session after yast has already started. Even without ssh just pure, single tty serial, there are menu options in the initial curses/dialog menus to get a shell before launching yast. It's slightly inconvenient having to do things manually that could be automated or at least made more convenient with menu/form driven front ends, but it's hardly a problem. No booting a separate livecd or even re-starting the same suse installer. Just drop to a shell, do your thing, resume. -- bkw -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org