Is it possible to create a Linux (2.6) block device (such as a loopback device) with an odd size? I couldn't make it happen. losetup seems to round down to 512 byte boundary. The ubd devices of User-mode Linux ubd devices seem to round up to 512 byte boundary. In struct request, we have sector_t __sector for the block offset for read/write operations.
I'm asking this question just for educational purposes. I can cope with the 512 byte boundary, but I'm still interested if it would be possible to bypass it. In this question I'm not interested in other layers of abstraction (such as using regular files or character devices).
No. The Linux 2.6 block layer doesn't comprehend anything smaller than 512 bytes. Anything smaller (especially not a power of 2) would require a major rewrite of an awful lot of code.