Yup. I looked at this while doing design work for a certain highly visible gaming product. You want the responsibility for block leveling and transactional goop close to the device, where the firmware can know stuff about device geometry and other nasty bits that affect reliability.
Putting that stuff in the OS puts you back to, oh, the same wicked stuff that people had to deal with for MFM hard drives (remember cylinder, head and sector counts? Only probably ten times more complicated).
A block level abstraction is fine, as long as the abstraction can make some transactional guarantees.
Putting that stuff in the OS puts you back to, oh, the same wicked stuff that people had to deal with for MFM hard drives (remember cylinder, head and sector counts? Only probably ten times more complicated).
A block level abstraction is fine, as long as the abstraction can make some transactional guarantees.