k...@munnari.oz.au (Robert Elz) writes: >I have been meaning to suggest for ages that we remove all the >geometry nonsense from everywhere in the kernel, except those >drivers that actually need it.
We use that nonsense without actually knowing. The "cylinder" value is used to sort disk accesses. The "sector" value was used to optimize filesystem allocation. Neither takes the values as is (the values are mostly fake anyway), but as a hint. Newer technologies may not use C/H/S coordinates, but every HDD still uses cylinders and every SSD has a topology based on erase blocks where "cylinder" could be a hint to optimize accesses. So, such information should not be removed but needs to be exposed. Better if it were exposed 1:1 from the underlying technology, but it still needs to be compatible with the abstractions that use it. Doesn't mean that you could not find a better abstraction for a storage medium in the future. For now, pretending everything is a rotational disk from 50 years ago doesn't hurt but helps.
