Partition does not end on cylinder boundary

[Alan Cox]

> to the file's or dir's inode as possible. So, even if the a disk cylinder
> is now a virtual thing, it still helps in organizing the disk

The notion of a cylinder group comes from BSD, and in 4.2 BSD FFS they
were indeed physically laid out to match the media. Linux has never done
that because by the time Linux existed it made no sense.

> Perhaps someone will write a new FS that will completely
> get away from blocks and cylinders.

The only notion a Linux file system abstraction uses is a block number,
where 0 is one end of the media and [large number] the other. It doesn't
care whether that is flash, rotating media, or indeed cards pinned to
donuts.

There are some file systems which don't deal with abstract blocking in
quite the same way - those are the raw flash file systems that use MTD
(eg JFFS2). They have to have a deeper knowledge of the underlying media
because of the complex rules about age wearing and erase block sizes on
flash media.
 
Alan