Re: [PATCH] lightnvm: pblk: Introduce hot-cold data separation

[Javier GonzÃlez]

> On 26 Apr 2019, at 11.11, Igor Konopko <igor.j.konopko@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> On 25.04.2019 07:21, Heiner Litz wrote:
>> Introduce the capability to manage multiple open lines. Maintain one line
>> for user writes (hot) and a second line for gc writes (cold). As user and
>> gc writes still utilize a shared ring buffer, in rare cases a multi-sector
>> write will contain both gc and user data. This is acceptable, as on a
>> tested SSD with minimum write size of 64KB, less than 1% of all writes
>> contain both hot and cold sectors.
> 
> Hi Heiner
> 
> Generally I really like this changes, I was thinking about sth similar since a while, so it is very good to see that patch.
> 
> I have a one question related to this patch, since it is not very clear for me - how you ensure the data integrity in following scenarios:
> -we have open line X for user data and line Y for GC
> -GC writes LBA=N to line Y
> -user writes LBA=N to line X
> -we have power failure when both line X and Y were not written completely
> -during pblk creation we are executing OOB metadata recovery
> And here is the question, how we distinguish whether LBA=N from line Y or LBA=N from line X is the valid one?
> Line X and Y might have seq_id either descending or ascending - this would create two possible scenarios too.
> 
> Thanks
> Igor
> 

You are right, I think this is possible in the current implementation.

We need an extra constrain so that we only GC lines above the GC line
ID. This way, when we order lines on recovery, we can guarantee
consistency. This means potentially that we would need several open
lines for GC to avoid padding in case this constrain forces to choose a
line with an ID higher than the GC line ID.

What do you think?

Thanks,
Javier

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