Some devices have exhibited sensitivity to the ending alignment of
partitions. In particular, even if the first partition begins at 1
MiB, we have seen many sd driver task abort errors with certain SSDs
if the first partition doesn't end on a 1 MiB boundary. This occurs
when the vdev label is read during pool creation or importation and
causes a delay of about 30 seconds per device. It can also be
simulated with dd when the pool isn't imported:
dd if=/dev/sda1 of=/dev/null bs=262144 count=1
For the record, this problem was observed with SMARTMOD
SG9XCA2E200GE01 200GB SSDs. Unfortunately I don't have a good
explanation for this behavior. It seems to have something to do with
highly fragmented single-sector requests being issued to the device,
which it may not support. With end-aligned partitions at least
page-sized requests were queued and issued to the driver according
to blktrace. In any case, aligning the partition end is a fairly
innocuous work-around, wasting at most 1 MiB of space.
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
Closes#574
613d88eda8