On Sun, Jul 14, 2013 at 02:07:41PM +1000, Tim Connors wrote:
> Other than the compatibility reason stated there, this FAQ, and the
> differing behaviour of the scheduling elevator dependent upon whether
> it's a disk or a partition, has always *smelt* to me.

it's not about whether it's a disk or a partition, it's about the
alignment of the partition with a multiple of the sector size.

4K alignment works for both 512-byte sector drives and 4K or "advanced
format" drives

> If dealing with a whole disk, it still creates -part1 & -part9 anyway.

yep, it creates a GPT partition table so that the data partiton is
4K-aligned.

interesting discussion here:

https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues/94



in theory, zfs could use the raw disk and start at sector 0, but one
of the risks there is that careless use of tools like grub-install (or
fdisk/gdisk/parted etc) could bugger up your pool....and there's really
no good reason not to use a partition table, at worst you lose the first
1MB (2048 x 512 bytes) of each disk.

> eh? parted has done proper alignment by default since just after the
> dinosaurs were wiped out.

it's still quite common for drives to be partitioned so that the first
partition starts on sector 63 rather than 2048 - which works fine for
512-byte sectors but not so great for 4K-sector drives.

and i know i've spent significant amounts of time in the past, tediously
calculating the optimum offsets for partitions to use with mdadm.

craig

-- 
craig sanders <[email protected]>

BOFH excuse #424:

operation failed because: there is no message for this error (#1014)
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