To support devices with physical block sizes bigger than 512 bytes we
need to ensure proper alignment. This patch adds support for exposing
I/O topology characteristics as devices are stacked.
logical_block_size is the smallest unit the device can address.
physical_block_size indicates the smallest I/O the device can write
without incurring a read-modify-write penalty.
The io_min parameter is the smallest preferred I/O size reported by
the device. In many cases this is the same as the physical block
size. However, the io_min parameter can be scaled up when stacking
(RAID5 chunk size > physical block size).
The io_opt characteristic indicates the optimal I/O size reported by
the device. This is usually the stripe width for arrays.
The alignment_offset parameter indicates the number of bytes the start
of the device/partition is offset from the device's natural alignment.
Partition tools and MD/DM utilities can use this to pad their offsets
so filesystems start on proper boundaries.
Signed-off-by: Martin K. Petersen <martin.petersen@oracle.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
Update the documentation to reflect the change in userspace interface.
Signed-off-by: Jerome Marchand <jmarchan@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
Martin K. Petersen