Re: Advanced storage management ( suggestion )

From: Mike Fedyk
Date: Sun Mar 07 2004 - 01:10:18 EST


Neil Brown wrote:
On Saturday March 6, mfedyk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

2- Support for multi-disk/multi-host storage pool.

You're mixing layers here. MD and DM already work in this area.



I would probably disagree here.
I think it makes much more sense for a filesystem to know about
multiple devices than for MD or DM to combine a bunch of devices into
the illusion of one big device, only to have the filesystem chop that
big device into little files....

(Note that I wouldn't expect a filesystem to include raid5 style
behaviour, and probably wouldn't expect raid1 like behaviour, but
having the filesystem do striping and inter-device migration itself
seems eminently sensible.)


I saw something doing that in a SAN. Don't know if it was at the filesytem level though.

However I don't see much value if the suggestion of a new layer that
provide lots of services of filesystems. I strongly suspect that no
filesystem would want to use them. Look at "jdb". It is designed to
provide a journalling layer for any filesystem, but how many
filesystems use it? Just one - ext3 - the one it was designed for.

Since JBD is "Journaled Block Device", does that mean it's meant for block based journaling instead of "virtual" (I don't think I'm using the right term, so please someone correct me) journaling?

Mike
-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/