Re: some questions about uploading a Linux kernel driver FusionRAID
From: Paul Menzel
Date: Fri Apr 24 2020 - 04:24:43 EST
Dear Xiaosong, dear Tsinghua,
Am 22.04.20 um 14:26 schrieb Xiaosong Ma:
This is Xiaosong Ma from Qatar Computing Research Institute. I am
writing to follow up with the questions posed by a co-author from
Tsinghua U, regarding upstreaming our alternative md implementation
that is designed to significantly reduce SSD RAID latency (both median
and tail) for large SSD pools (such as 20-disk or more).
Sorry for the late reply, and thank you for wanting to upstream the driver.
We read the Linux kernel upstreaming instructions, and believe that
our implementation has excellent separability from the current code
base (as a plug-and-play module with identical interfaces as md).
Is there a chance to integrate it into the current driver, and then
choose it, when creating the RAID?
Meanwhile, we wonder whether there are standard test cases or
preferred applications that we should test our system with, before
doing code cleaning up. Your guidance is much appreciated.
[â]
I am Tianyang JIANG, a PhD student from Tsinghua U. We finish a study
which focuses on achieving consistent low latency for SSD arrays,
especially timing tail latency in RAID level. We implement a Linux
kernel driver called FusionRAID and we are interested in uploading
codes to Linux upstream.
I notice that I should separate my changes and style-check my codes
before submitting. Are there any other issues I need to be aware of?
Thank you for your time.
Is your code in some public git branch to be looked at already?
Otherwise, I believe just posting the patch train with `git send-email`
and a cover letter, might be the best first step, so the developers can
comment early before you put too much time into refactoring.
Some easy to reproduce test scripts to verify the performance benefits
would indeed be nice, but I do not know, if that can be integrated into
some Linux kernel test infrastructure already.
Kind regards,
Paul