On Tuesday 29 April 2003 20:25, Kwon SoonSon wrote:
> >
> > There has been a report of a problem with running
> > XFS (in 2.4 kernels) on
> > RAID-1 and/or RAID-5 devices that have been
> > converted into EVMS volumes. The
> > problem stems from XFS not following some implicit
> > block-I/O restrictions.
> > Work-arounds have been added to XFS to recognize MD,
> > LVM1, and EVMS 1.2, but
> > it does not yet recognize Device-Mapper.
> >
> > If you aren't using RAID-1 or RAID-5 (or possibly
> > striped LVM volumes), you
> > shouldn't have any problems.
>
> Cc'ing xfs-devel just in case....
>
> Then, does this mean that XFS cannot be used with
> RAID-1 orRAID-5 whether it is software RAID or
> hardware
> RAID?
>
> Not being able to recognize device mapper seems to be
> a big problem as of now because that sounds like
> it does not recognize LVM2 which works with device
> mapper.
>
> If I am wrong, please let me know....
[My previous email should have used RAID-0 as an example instead of RAID-1, as
I'll explain below. Sorry for any possible confusion. Also - XFS guys - if I
mangle this explanation, feel free to slap me around.]
As I understand the issue, XFS may do unaligned I/O when mounting the
filesystem. This works fine on devices that are a single, linear, physically
contiguous range of sectors. However, on striped devices (RAID-0, RAID-5, and
some EVMS/LVM/Device-Mapper devices), the device being mounted is not
physically contiguous on disk. These block-device-drivers are not expecting
unaligned I/Os, and thus if an I/O happened to cross some internal boundary
(i.e. the I/O spans two stripe chunks), the data is most likely going to get
mangled.
Thus, XFS (for 2.4) currently checks the major number of the device being
mounted to see if it is an MD, LVM1, or EVMS-1.2 volume. In the version of
XFS that I currently have (snapshot from early April, I believe), this check
is performed in fs/xfs/linux/xfs_super.c::xfs_alloc_buftarg(). If one of
these devices are detected, a flag is set indicating that all I/O should be
aligned. Thus, a similar check needs to be added to detect Device-Mapper
devices.
The tricky part about this check is that Device-Mapper doesn't have a
statically defined major number (the way MD, LVM1, and EVMS-1.2 have). It
simply asks the block-layer for a major number when the driver is loaded. And
what will make it even trickier is that Device-Mapper will eventually support
multiple major numbers. So XFS will somehow need to probe Device-Mapper for
the current list of registered major numbers, and compare against the major
number of the device being mounted.
So that's the jist of the issue. And none of this is a problem in 2.5, since
the block layer is now expected to handle large I/O requests at any offset.
--
Kevin Corry
kevcorry@xxxxxxxxxx
http://evms.sourceforge.net/
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