Re: Some thoughts about providing data block checksumming for ext4

[Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>]

On Wed, Nov 26 2014 at  6:47pm -0500,
Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com> wrote:

> Sigh...
> 
> Well, I wrote up a preliminary version of dm-checksum and then
> realized that I've pretty much just built a crappier version of
> dm-dedupe, but without the dedupe part.  Given that it stores
> checksums in a btree which claims to be robust through failures and
> gives us automatic deduplication, I wonder if it we could achieve our
> aims by modifying dm-dedupe to verify the checksums on the read path?
> 
> I guess it would be interesting to see how bad the performance hit is
> with the online dedupe part enabled or disabled.  dm-dedupe v2 went
> out on the mailing list last August, which I missed. :(
> 
> Unless... there's a specific reason nobody mentioned dm-dedupe here?

As you may have seen in the dm-dedup thread, we need to actively
review/test that target (if your initial review focus is on extending it
to _optionally_ verify the checksums on the read path then so be it).

See: https://www.redhat.com/archives/dm-devel/2014-November/msg00114.html
Specifically, the git branch that builds on v2 based on my initial
review of v2:

git://git.fsl.cs.stonybrook.edu/scm/git/linux-dmdedup
branch: dm-dedup-devel

Your help on getting dm-dedup upstream would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,
Mike