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Confused about the Write Zeroes command
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this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2023
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I am coming at this from a more general angle, so this may not be as applicable.
When a repeated series of inputs is written to a drive, a number of optimisations can be applied. If the user wants a large number of zeros written, the drive's firmware can use a short cut. Instead of writing those zeros, it can make a note that a number of blocks, at a location, are all zero.
This becomes apparent if one runs fio against the raw block devices versus a software later like LVM. Some operations against some layers will be unreasonably fast. There is a lot of nuance to this.
My read of the quirk is an incompatibility between what Linux expects and the firmware. Enable the quirk only if the dmesg errors are present. Do not expect that the drive has been zeroed. If you want your data secure at disposal of the drive, the then use encryption.
Thanks a lot! This clarifies it for me, and if I understand correctly, it shouldn't be a concern for me since my laptop isn't used for data-intensive computing.