From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Mike Snitzer Subject: Re: Does multipath require disabled write cache? Date: Mon, 21 Jul 2014 13:49:39 -0400 Message-ID: <20140721174939.GA31622@redhat.com> References: <53CC3287.3010708@shiftmail.org> Reply-To: device-mapper development Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <53CC3287.3010708@shiftmail.org> List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Sender: dm-devel-bounces@redhat.com Errors-To: dm-devel-bounces@redhat.com To: Spelic Cc: device-mapper development List-Id: dm-devel.ids On Sun, Jul 20 2014 at 5:20pm -0400, Spelic wrote: > Hello all, > I am wondering if multipath requires a disabled write cache at the > remote disks. > We have some external SAS disks, for which the connection is flaky > and sometimes is lost and then they are detected again. Multipath > seems perfect for this situation. > However, when the disks are lost, I suppose resets are issued, which > might clear the write cache so that data located there might not be > committed (true? well at least on power loss this is true). You should disable both the controller cache and disk caches if they are volatile. Filesystems will issue flushes (and DM will handle those flushes) but until those flushes return successfully the associated outstanding data is not considered on permanent storage. > It would be great if multipath would issue a flush every N writes, > and then remember the last N writes and resubmit them when the path > is reestablished, so that there is again chance to flush them to > stable storage. (similar to DRBD epochs) However I don't know if > this smart mechanism is implemented. It isn't implemented.