Re: Hot-replace for RAID5

[NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de>]

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On Tue, 15 May 2012 13:56:58 +0200 Patrik Horník <patrik@dsl.sk> wrote:

> Anyway increasing it to 5K did not help and drives don't seem to be
> fully utilized.
> 
> Does the reshape work something like this:
> - Read about X = (50M / N - 1 / stripe size) stripes from drives and
> write them to the backup-file
> - Reshape X stripes one by another sequentially
> - Reshaping stripe by reading chunks from all drives, calculate Q,
> writing all chunks back and doing I/O for next stripe only after
> finishing previous one?
> 
> So after increasing stripe_cache_size the cache should hold stripes
> after backing them and so reshaping should not need to read them from
> drives again?
> 
> Cant the slow speed be caused by some synchronization issues? How are
> the stripes read for writing them to backup-file? Is it done one by
> one, so I/Os for next stripe are issued only after having read the
> previous stripe completely? Are they issued in maximum parallel way
> possible?

There is as much parallelism as I could manage.
The backup file is divided into 2 sections.
Write to one,  then the other, then invalidate the first and write to it etc.
So while one half is being written, the data in the other half is being
reshaped in the array.
Also the stripe reads are scheduled asynchronously and as soon as a stripe is
fully available, the Q is calculated and they are scheduled for write.

The slowness is due to continually having to seek back a little way to over
write what has just be read, and also having to update the metadata each time
to record where we are up to.

NeilBrown


> 
> Patrik
> 
> 
> On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 1:28 PM, NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de> wrote:
> > On Tue, 15 May 2012 13:16:42 +0200 Patrik Horník <patrik@dsl.sk> wrote:
> >
> >> Can I increase it during reshape by echo N >
> >> /sys/block/mdX/md/stripe_cache_size?
> >
> > Yes.
> >
> >
> >>
> >> How is the size determined? I have only 1027 while having 8 GB system memory...
> >
> > Not very well.
> >
> > It is set to 256, or the minimum size needed to allow the reshape to proceed
> > (which means about 4 chunks worth).  I should probably add some auto-sizing
> > but that sort of stuff is hard :-(
> >
> > NeilBrown
> >


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