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Re: XFS and Raid

To: "Martin K. Petersen" <mkp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: XFS and Raid
From: Dan Yocum <yocum@xxxxxxxx>
Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2001 11:22:15 -0600
Cc: Anuradha Ratnaweera <anuradha@xxxxxxx>, linux-xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx
References: <20011108171403.A28816@bee.lk> <yq1hes5xrtj.fsf@jaguar.mkp.net>
Sender: owner-linux-xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx
"Martin K. Petersen" wrote:
> 
> >>>>> "Anuradha" == Anuradha Ratnaweera <anuradha@xxxxxxx> writes:
> 
> Anuradha> Is there any advantage in specifying chunk size etc. when
> Anuradha> running mkfs.xfs?
> 
> For RAID1, no.  For RAID0 and RAID5, potentially.
> 
> Anuradha> If yes, where is it documented?  I went through what is on
> Anuradha> the mkfs.xfs man page but is not inadaquate.
> 
> Have you read the sections about sunit and swidth?


Yup.  Still doesn't make much sense to me.  It sounds like swidth is
analogous to chunk-size in software raid, but what is sunit?

And are 'sw' and 'su' just the abreviated forms of swidth and sunit,
respectively?


> 
> In general mkfs.xfs will do the right thing.  As the man page states,
> when you run mkfs on an LVM or MD device it will automagically extract
> the stripe unit and stripe width.
> 
> If you have a hardware RAID device, however, you'll have to specify
> these parameters manually to match the configuration of your device.


So, to wit, in our systems we have 2, 8 disk HW RAID5 arrays which are SW
RAID0 (striped) together.  The HW chunk size is 64k (this is hardcoded). 
The SW chunk size is 512k.  I wish that I could make this 448k (so one SW
chunk goes to one array, with the left over used as the parity chunk), but
that's not possible.  

So, xfs_info shows this:

[root@sdssdp10 dp]# xfs_info /export/data/dp10.a/
meta-data=/export/data/dp10.a    isize=512    agcount=268, agsize=1048576
blks
data     =                       bsize=4096   blocks=280145408, imaxpct=25
         =                       sunit=128    swidth=256 blks, unwritten=0
naming   =version 2              bsize=4096  
log      =internal               bsize=4096   blocks=32768
realtime =none                   extsz=1048576 blocks=0, rtextents=0


Why?  Shouldn't swidth be 1000?  And about sunit... well, I'm just confused
about what that should be.


> 
> --
> Martin K. Petersen, Principal Linux Consultant, Linuxcare, Inc.
                      ^^^^^^^^^

'bout damn time.  :-)

Cheers,
Dan


-- 
Dan Yocum
Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Fermilab  630.840.6509
yocum@xxxxxxxx, http://www.sdss.org
SDSS.  Mapping the Universe.


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