lilofile posted on Mon, 21 Oct 2013 23:45:58 +0800 as excerpted: > hi: > since RAID 5/6 code merged into Btrfs from 2013.2, no update and > bug are found in maillist? is any development plan with btrfs raid5? > such as adjusting stripe width、 reconstruction？ > compared to md raid5 what is advantage in btrfs raid5 ? AFAIK, btrfs raid5/6 modes are still not considered ready for deployed use, only for testing (tho with each new kernel cycle I wonder if that has changed, but no word on it changing yet). This is because there's a hole in the recovery process in case of a lost device, making it dangerous to use except for the pure test-case. Yes, flushing out the features a bit is planned, tho I've not tracked specifics. (My primary interest and use-case is the N-way-mirroring raid1 case, which is roadmapped for merging after raid5/6 stabilize; current "raid1" case is limited to 2-way-mirroring. So mostly I'm simply tracking raid5/6 progress in relation to that, not for its own merits, thus I'm not personally tracking the specifics too closely.) The advantage in btrfs raid5/6 is that unlike md/raid, btrfs knows what blocks are actually used by data/metadata, and can use that information in a rebuild/recovery situation to only sync/rebuild the actually used blocks on a re-added or replacement device, skipping blocks that were entirely unused/empty in the first place. md/raid can't do that, because it tries to be a filesystem agnostic layer that doesn't know nor care what blocks on the layers above it were actually used or empty. For it to try to track that would be a layering violation and would seriously complicate the code and/or limit usage to only those filesystems or other layers above that it supported/understood/ could-properly-track. A comparable relationship exists between a ramdisk (comparable to md/ raid) and tmpfs (comparable to btrfs) -- the first is transparent and allows the flexibility of putting whatever filesystem or other upper layer on top, while the latter is the filesystem layer itself, allowing nothing else above it. But the ramdisk/tmpfs case deals with memory emulating block device storage, while the mdraid/btrfs case deals with multiple block devices emulating a single device. In both cases each has its purpose, with the strengths of one being the limitations of the other, and you choose the one that best matches your use case. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-btrfs" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
