RE: current status of alpha in squeeze - Storage Question - we will need to store the code some where - Fwd: Disk drives

["Joel Nimar" <Joel.Nimar@pyramiddec.com>]

We are looking into to it

Best Wishes,


Joel Nimar
Pyramid Technology Services
10 Riverbank Rd 
Maynard, MA 01754 USA

Tel 978-823-0700 fax 978-897-9611
www.pyramiddec.com

Your source for enterprise computing and networking products


-----Original Message-----
From: Witold Baryluk [mailto:baryluk@smp.if.uj.edu.pl] 
Sent: Monday, March 28, 2011 4:31 PM
To: Robert Garron
Cc: joel@pyramiddec.com; Bill.Parke@access3000.net; Richard Holstein;
Michael Cree; Phil Carmody; debian-alpha@lists.debian.org;
aba@not.so.argh.org; aloiret@debian.org; cpp@ekkaia.net; Rafael Ruiz
Subject: Re: current status of alpha in squeeze - Storage Question - we will
need to store the code some where - Fwd: Disk drives

On 03-28 12:43, Robert Garron wrote:
> Joel,
> 
> Can your group do what Bill is asking below?  
> Similar to the change of 36 gig to 300 gig...
> 
> Regards,
> Robert
> 
> ----------  Forwarded Message  ----------
> 
> Subject: Disk drives
> Date: Mon March 28 2011
> From: Bill Parke <Bill.Parke@access3000.net>
> To: Robert Garron <Robert.Garron@access3000.net>, Ken Ballou 
> <thecryptoboy@gmail.com>
> 
> Ask Joel if SATA drives, with 4KB block size drives can be supported.  
> Anything
> over 2.7TB disk drives are not addressable in 512 byte blocks.
> 
> Also, I believe the general Grub 2 (We need to get to it) supports GPT 
> drives so
> there may or may not need to be microcode changes needed.   Or the Grub
folks 
> may have already doen this (I would expect).

AFAIK no Alpha machine uses Grub for booting.
MILO or aboot is used in most cases. Maybe Sometimes directly SRM, or
AlphaBIOS as a hack, but not a grub.

> We will need Debian's test harnesses and test modules used for old 
> Alpha and new AMD (to adapt).

Alpha have 8k memory pages, but it works for example with smaller
block-size, in example when using ext3 it will use normal to ext3 a 4K (as
using 8K, will make such this unreadable under IA-32, which have upper limit
of 4K file system blocks under Linux, as it is a size of page).

As of disks, I have a one disk (Western Digital Caviar Green 1.5TB), which I
can attach for a brief period of time into my Alpha, using PCI SATA
controler. But I think other people is already using such disks in their
machines. Can anybody confirm?

Anyway 4k blocks SATA devices are still adressed using 512 byte unites, or
maybe something changed in SATA-3 ?


Regards,
Witek

--
Witold Baryluk