4 ms·
How about fixing RAID5 first please? At least for non-metadata blocks ("-draid5 -mraid1" or "-draid6 -mraid1c3")? https://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item
by KirillPanov 6y ago
How about fixing RAID5 first please? At least for non-metadata blocks ("-draid5 -mraid1" or "-draid6 -mraid1c3")?
https://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Btrfs-Warning-RAID5-RAID6 https://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Btrfs-Warnin...
It's kind of insane that two companies now sell a fixed btrfs-RAID5 as a proprietary commercial product (yes, in spite of the GPL). They do it by using the mdadm RAID5 code, which works, and add proprietary hooks to allow btrfs to use its checksums to figure out which spindle is corrupt in a parity mismatch situation. This (a) closes the write hole without a journal doubling the I/O load and (b) detects silent corruption, neither of which mdadm can do.
Or just upstream this patch set:
https://www.mail-archive.com/linux-btrfs@vger.kernel.org/msg93181.html https://www.mail-archive.com/linux-btrfs@vger.kernel.org/msg...
...so we can do this ourselves with LVM (split each spindle into a small metadata device and a large device, stitch the large data devices together with mdadm-raid5/6, then add that and all the small devices to a btrfs filesystem with the small devices marked "metadata only" and -dsingle -mraid1c3).
I really feel like the btrfs guys are stuck in "shiny new thing" mode here. Last time I checked host-managed SMR devices were only available in engineering sample quantities. Even if that's changed they surely are still very rare, a tiny minority of worldwide storage device sales. The fact that btrfs-RAID5 scrubs take something like O(num_spindles^2) seek latencies is crazy... I have an 8-spindle array that scrubs in 12 hours with "-draid0" but takes 10 days with "-draid5".
- scaladev 6y agoI am sure that Western Digital (whom the author of this patchset works for) will be very interested in your opinion. He implements whatever makes business sense for WD, and not what some random forum commenter wants. I am not at all surprised that a storage vendor would want upstream Linux support for its upcoming devices before they're actually being sold in stores.
- yokaze 6y agoI think, it's simply not high importance for the commercial backers of the project. It's not a hobby those people get payed for it. Raid5/6 seems to me more popular in home use.
- kalleboo 6y agoWhats sad is that there is clearly a commercial value to the feature, but that commercial value is captured by proprietary implementations of it (e.g. Synology's btrfs-on-mdraid)
- KirillPanov 6y agoExactly this. The fact that Synology's makes money selling their proprietary btrfs-RAID5 is incontrovertible proof of the commercial relevance.
- pantalaimon 6y agoLooks like there is someone working on it https://www.mail-archive.com/linux-btrfs@vger.kernel.org/msg95863.html https://www.mail-archive.com/linux-btrfs@vger.kernel.org/msg...