Tag Archives: partition

Why partition alignment on disk matters (Linux)

Linux has been pretty good with and for storage. The sheer volume of options w.r.t. filesystems, volume-managers, access methods (FC, iSCSI, NFS, DAS etc), multi-pathing  but also the very broad support of the hardware ecosystem is something to be proud of. The issue with storage support is that you ALWAYS have to maintain a massive backward-compatibility string with previous generations of technology. Not only from a hardware perspective but also the soft-side needs to retain the older technology. I saw a video featuring Linus, Greg Kroah-Hartman,  Sarah Sharp and Ted Ts’o over here where Ted mentioned that the KVM feature helped him massively with regression testing for the storage projects he’s involved in. (As you may know Ted maintains the ext(2/3/4) filesystem among other things). That brings me to the bottleneck of history in a technology environment and why the topic I described in the subject is important.

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