Re: [Drbd-dev] [PATCH 05/30] drbd: Introduce new disk config option rs-discard-granularity

From: Bart Van Assche
Date: Mon Apr 25 2016 - 15:04:31 EST


On 04/25/2016 09:42 AM, Philipp Reisner wrote:
Am Montag, 25. April 2016, 08:35:26 schrieb Bart Van Assche:
On 04/25/2016 05:10 AM, Philipp Reisner wrote:
As long as the value is 0 the feature is disabled. With setting
it to a positive value, DRBD limits and aligns its resync requests
to the rs-discard-granularity setting. If the sync source detects
all zeros in such a block, the resync target discards the range
on disk.

Can you explain why rs-discard-granularity is configurable instead of
e.g. setting it to the least common multiple of the discard
granularities of the underlying block devices at both sides?

we had this idea as well. It seems that real world devices like larger
discards better than smaller discards. The other motivation was that
a device mapper logical volume might change it on the fly...
So we think it is best to delegate the decision on the discard chunk
size to user space.

Hello Phil,

Are you aware that for aligned discard requests the discard granularity does not affect the size of discard requests at all?

Regarding LVM volumes: if the discard granularity for such volumes can change on the fly, shouldn't I/O be quiesced by the LVM kernel driver before it changes the discard granularity? I think that increasing discard granularity while I/O is in progress should be considered as a bug.

Bart.