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.
- Ted
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