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
Feature changed by: Arvin Schnell (aschnell)
Feature #312273, revision 9
Title: Update yast-partitioner GUI to reflect they way it works
internally
openSUSE Distribution: Unconfirmed
Priority
Requester: Mandatory
Requested by: Andrew Joakimsen (joak0)
Partner organization: openSUSE.org
Description:
Summary Description yast-partitioner was updated for 11.3 and newer to
stop using CHS information as its primary partition alignment strategy.
The user interface was never updated to match. The user interface for
yast2-partitioner should be updated to allow the user to select legacy
CHS presentation and the more modern presentation units of sectors /
MBs / GBs or other units more appropriate to raid strides.
Original Description
On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 08:14, Greg Freemyer
If you'll post the openFATE link to your proposal, I'll add my vote.
Greg >> > The current functionality is a bug and I have long ago reported it as such. Disks are addressed by logical sectors this millenium. It's a bug to show an obsolete, not-convertible unit. serves no purpose unit. The fix to that bug is to show the relevant unit. -- Med Vennlig Hilsen, A. Helge Joakimsen
Use Case: openSUSE now defaults to 1MB partition alignment. The current CHS presentation is meaningless for that. The same is true for SSDs and raid arrays. Thus the current presentation is only useful for drives partitioned with openSUSE 11.2 or older. Discussion: #1: Arvin Schnell (aschnell) (2011-04-26 09:39:26) The YaST partitioner does still use cylinders internally. What has changed is parted: It now creates new partitions with 1MB alignment and respects the topology information provided by the kernel. Showing sectors in YaST is not possible for new (not yet created on disk) partitions unless we reimplement the complete alignment code from parted in YaST. I also think that showing sectors is useless since the numbers are simply oversized (e.g. 10 digits) and are meaningless unless we also show the topology information. #2: Greg Freemyer (gregfreemyer) (2011-04-26 22:25:47) (reply to #1) If I have misstated the situation about the internals, then please feel free to correct the description. If I understand you its more than just a GUI update, there are still internal parts of the yast-partitioner that treat cylinders as special. I think it should have a legacy mode where that continues to be true, and modern mode where cylinders are simply not important. As to my assumption about the internals being done: My reasoning is openfate: https://features.opensuse.org/306443 Called for yast-partitioner to be updated to leverage hardware topology information for partition alignment purposes. My understanding is that feature was accomplished for 11.3, but the GUI was never updated to match. + #3: Arvin Schnell (aschnell) (2011-04-27 09:17:45) (reply to #2) + Fate #306443 was done by updating to parted 2.2. YaST was almost + unaffected by that feature and still uses cylinders internally. -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/312273