Re: Advanced storage management ( suggestion )

From: Neil Brown
Date: Sat Mar 06 2004 - 23:32:01 EST


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.)

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.

NeilBrown
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