Re: [PLUG] advice on kernel errors?

[Jeff Abrahamson <jeff@purple.com>]

On Fri, Jul 01, 2005 at 09:56:55AM -0400, Dan Goodman wrote:
> Cosmin Nicolaescu wrote:
> > Dan Goodman wrote: 
> >>... [C]an anybody comment on whether or not Linux supports bad
> >>block marking and relocation?
> >>
> > I was under the impression that it wasn't the OS's "duty".
> > It is:
> > A) the disk type (I thought ATA drives do not have bad block fowarding)
> > B) the filesystem
> > 
> > But I could be wrong on this..

This is what I understand as well, although it didn't always used to
be this way.  A long, long time ago, in the 1990's, disk drives might
not be able to do bad block marking and relocation.  Now they mostly
do.

Note, as a corollary, that this means that drive optimization is
largely useless now, as the drive's firmware does sector mapping, so
the OS has now idea where blocks really live.


> Ok, so technically the filesystem can exist independent(ly) of the
> OS, and there are disk types that support bad block marking at the
> HW level, (and semantic/linguistic flames are of a higher level of
> achievement than spelling flames):

> Does the ext3 filesystem detect and relocate badblocks? How about
> ext2 and the other popular distros' popular filesystem options?

You're very confused.  Since you already mentioned that you didn't
RTFM, perhaps it would be helpful for you to take an hour and read
about what file systems and operating systems actually are.  You'll be
able to pose better questions (questions that have answers, for
example), which will help you understand better.

The URL below might be a good place to start.  It will confuse you on
first reading, but you'll know you're making progress when a later
reading makes sense.

    http://www.linux.org/docs/ldp/howto/Filesystems-HOWTO.html

-- 
 Jeff

 Jeff Abrahamson  <http://www.purple.com/jeff/>    +1 215/837-2287
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