On Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 09:40:19PM -0400, Ted Ts'o wrote: > On Mon, Apr 23, 2012 at 01:17:34AM +0300, Touko Korpela wrote: > > Package: e2fsprogs > > Version: 1.42.2-2 > > Severity: normal > > > > I noticed that mke2fs has a default blocksize of 1024 bytes when it uses > > filesystem type 'small' (3-512MB) from mke2fs.conf. > > It's a bad thing for performance (more so now when 4K sector HDDs and SDDs > > are common). Also space savings are quite small. > > You can always override the blocksize if you feel strongly about this. > > The performance problem is only true on very new disks --- and it's > rare that someone would be formatted a file system so small on such > disks. I'll also note that many SDD's can handle 512 byte mis-aligned > blocks (i.e., Windows XP formatting) just fine. It doesn't make any > difference at all on Intel SSD's, for example. > > Secondly, mke2fs will use 4k blocks if the drive requires it (i.e., > for Advanced Format disks with 4k sectors). So the problem you're > worried about only occurs for Advanced Format drives with 512e > emulation. > > Finally, the only file system where someone is likely to be creating > that is this small in this day and age is the /boot filesystem --- and > there, even if the drive using 512-byte emulation, performance isn't > an issue since no one is executing out of /boot, or even modifying it > very often.
Yes, /boot is my primary worry. A thing to consider is that "dumb" SSDs and USB sticks/memory cards are more common than "smart" SSDs. And maybe some wants to resize such small filesystem bigger but resizing can't change blocksize larger. Still I think that at least filesystems that are larger than about 50-100MB in size default blocksize should be 4096. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
