11-19-2020, 04:24 PM
(11-18-2020, 12:59 PM)zackw Wrote: FYI Manjaro's installation images currently produce severely misaligned partitions
Non 4kB aligned partitions are usually really bad. I'd fix this even if I wasn't going to change FS type. What this means really depends on what the secret FTL inside the eMMC does. Maybe the firmware in it is smart enough to detect "screwed up partition table" and it offsets all the LBAs by 1? But most likely it means each write to a 4kB ext4 (or other fs) block involves a read-modify-write cycle to the two flash blocks (of unknown size, 2k? 4k?) that the ext4 block overlaps.
It would also be nice if they'd take those magic locations for the idbloader and so on and make them partitions. It's entirely possible to add them at the exact spot where the boot loader(s) will look for them. Then no more magic dd offsets need to be used, just go straight to the partition. And there is no my mystery blank space at the beginning of the eMMC where critical boot files are kept. And if they get to big to fit there's an error trying to flash them instead of silently overwriting and corrupting the boot file that comes afterward.
And use a gpt table, so partition labels can be used. Then idbloader.img goes to "/dev/disk/by-partlabel/idbloader". No more keeping track of partition numbers.