Re: [ANNOUNCE] Ramback: faster than a speeding bullet
From: Alan Cox
Date: Mon Mar 10 2008 - 05:35:57 EST
> So now you can ask some hard questions: what if the power goes out
> completely or the host crashes or something else goes wrong while
> critical data is still in the ramdisk? Easy: use reliable components.
Nice fiction - stuff crashes eventually - not that this isn't useful. For
a long time simply loading a 2-3GB Ramdisk off hard disk has been a good
way to build things like compile engines where loss of state is not bad.
> If UPS power runs out while ramback still holds unflushed dirty data
> then things get ugly. Hopefully a fsck -f will be able to pull
> something useful out of the mess. (This is where you might want to be
> running Ext3.) The name of the game is to install sufficient UPS power
> to get your dirty ramdisk data onto stable storage this time, every
> time.
Ext3 is only going to help you if the ramdisk writeback respects barriers
and ordering rules ?
> * Previously saved data must be reloaded into the ramdisk on startup.
/bin/cp from initrd
> * Cannot transfer directly between ramdisk and backing store, so must
> first transfer into memory then relaunch to destination.
Why not - providing you clear the dirty bit before the write and you
check it again after ? And on the disk size as you are going to have to
suck all the content back in presumably a log structure is not a big
concern ?
> * Per chunk locking is not feasible for a terabyte scale ramdisk.
And we care 8) ?
> * Handle chunk size other than PAGE_SIZE.
If you are prepared to go bigger than the fs chunk size so lose the
ordering guarantees your chunk size really ought to be *big* IMHO
Alan
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