patch-2.3.99-pre8 linux/Documentation/s390/DASD

• Lines: 74
• Date: Fri May 12 11:41:44 2000
• Orig file: v2.3.99-pre7/linux/Documentation/s390/DASD
• Orig date: Wed Dec 31 16:00:00 1969

diff -u --recursive --new-file v2.3.99-pre7/linux/Documentation/s390/DASD linux/Documentation/s390/DASD
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+DASD device driver
+
+S/390's disk devices (DASDs) are managed by Linux via the DASD device
+driver. It is valid for all types of DASDs and represents them to
+Linux as block devices, namely "dd". Currently the DASD driver uses a
+single major number (254) and 4 minor numbers per volume (1 for the
+physical volume and 3 for partitions). With respect to partitions see
+below. Thus you may have up to 64 DASD devices in your system.
+
+The kernel parameter 'dasd=from-to,...' may be issued arbitrary times
+in the kernel's parameter line or not at all. The 'from' and 'to'
+parameters are to be given in hexadecimal notation without a leading
+0x.
+If you supply kernel parameters the different instances are processed
+in order of appearance and a minor number is reserved for any device
+covered by the supplied range up to 64 volumes. Additional DASDs are
+ignored. If you do not supply the 'dasd=' kernel parameter at all, the 
+DASD driver registers all supported DASDs of your system to a minor
+number in ascending order of the subchannel number.
+
+The driver currently supports ECKD-devices and there are stubs for
+support of the FBA and CKD architectures. For the FBA architecture
+only some smart data structures are missing to make the support
+complete. 
+We performed our testing on 3380 and 3390 type disksof different
+sizes, under VM and on the bare hardware (LPAR), using internal disks
+of the multiprise as well as a RAMAC virtual array. Disks exported by
+an Enterprise Storage Server (Seascape) should work fine as well.
+
+We currently implement one partition per volume, which is the whole
+volume, skipping the first blocks up to the volume label. These are
+reserved for IPL records and IBM's volume label to assure
+accessability of the DASD from other OSs. In a later stage we will
+provide support of partitions, maybe VTOC oriented or using a kind of
+partition table in the label record.
+
+USAGE
+
+-Low-level format (?CKD only)
+For using an ECKD-DASD as a Linux harddisk you have to low-level
+format the tracks by issueing the BLKDASDFORMAT-ioctl on that
+device. This will erase any data on that volume including IBM volume
+labels, VTOCs etc. The ioctl may take a 'struct format_data *' or
+'NULL' as an argument.  
+typedef struct {
+	int start_unit;
+	int stop_unit;
+	int blksize;
+} format_data_t;
+When a NULL argument is passed to the BLKDASDFORMAT ioctl the whole
+disk is formatted to a blocksize of 1024 bytes. Otherwise start_unit
+and stop_unit are the first and last track to be formatted. If
+stop_unit is -1 it implies that the DASD is formatted from start_unit
+up to the last track. blksize can be any power of two between 512 and
+4096. We recommend no blksize lower than 1024 because the ext2fs uses
+1kB blocks anyway and you gain approx. 50% of capacity increasing your
+blksize from 512 byte to 1kB.
+
+-Make a filesystem
+Then you can mk??fs the filesystem of your choice on that volume or
+partition. For reasons of sanity you should build your filesystem on
+the partition /dev/dd?1 instead of the whole volume. You only lose 3kB	
+but may be sure that you can reuse your data after introduction of a
+real partition table.
+
+BUGS:
+- Performance sometimes is rather low because we don't fully exploit clustering
+
+TODO-List:
+- Add IBM'S Disk layout to genhd
+- Enhance driver to use more than one major number
+- Enable usage as a module
+- Support Cache fast write and DASD fast write (ECKD)