LWN article: 4K disk sectors

[Eric Sandeen]

Martin Steigerwald wrote:
> Am Donnerstag 12 März 2009 schrieb Michael Monnerie:
>> On Donnerstag 12 März 2009 Eric Sandeen wrote:
>>> Take a look at the mkfs.xfs man page:
>>>
>>>        -s sector_size
>>>               This option specifies the fundamental  sector  size  of
>>>               the filesystem.  The sector_size is specified either as
>>>               a value in bytes with size=value or as a base two loga-
>>>               rithm value with log=value.  The default sector_size is
>>>               512 bytes. The minimum value for sector  size  is  512;
>>>               the  maximum is 32768 (32 KiB). The sector_size must be
>>>               a power of 2 size and cannot be made  larger  than  the
>>>               filesystem block size.
>> Ugh, I felt so good this morning, until you responded ... ;-)
>>
>> I thought that it's a limitation of the Linux kernel in more parts than
>> just the filesystem (like block cache), that sector sizes must be 512B.
>> If I had a 4K drive, would that be usable with XFS already?
> 
> I have an USB stick with 2KB hardware sector size. It worked nicely when 
> using fdisk instead of cfdisk which only supports 512 byte sectors. Dunno 
> remember exactly which filesystems I tried back then.

really?  what kind of usb stick?  I've never seen such a thing.

-Eric