Linux distros with a 3.x kernel running on virtualized hardware (e.g. pvscsi on VMware) may ever so often spit out the following error:

$ dmesg | grep "WRITE SAME"
kernel: sda2: WRITE SAME failed. Manually zeroing.

This is because the disk driver (in our case: the VMware paravirtual driver) does not support the WRITE SAME SCSI command, resulting in this message.

While this poses no problem for the system at all, you may want to get rid of these messages, which is done by disabling the use of the WRITE SAME command. This can be done through a bit of configuration. Most modern systems have systemd on board which can be used for this, but in case your system doesn't, there's also a  ...