On 2015-09-22 13:32, Austin S Hemmelgarn wrote:
> On 2015-09-22 11:39, Hugo Mills wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 10:54:45AM -0400, Austin S Hemmelgarn wrote:
>>> On 2015-09-22 10:36, Hugo Mills wrote:
>>>> On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 04:23:33PM +0200, David Sterba wrote:
>>>>> On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 01:41:31PM +0000, Hugo Mills wrote:
>>>>>> On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 03:36:43PM +0200, Holger Hoffstätte wrote:
>>>>>>> On 09/22/15 14:59, Jeff Mahoney wrote:
>>>>>>> (snip)
>>>>>>>> So if they way we want to prevent the loss of raid type info is by
>>>>>>>> maintaining the last block group allocated with that raid type,
>>>>>>>> fine,
>>>>>>>> but that's a separate discussion.  Personally, I think keeping 1GB
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> At this point I'm much more surprised to learn that the RAID type
>>>>>>> can
>>>>>>> apparently get "lost" in the first place, and is not persisted
>>>>>>> separately. I mean..wat?
>>>>>>
>>>>>>     It's always been like that, unfortunately.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>     The code tries to use the RAID type that's already present to
>>>>>> work
>>>>>> out what the next allocation should be. If there aren't any chunks in
>>>>>> the FS, the configuration is lost, because it's not stored anywhere
>>>>>> else. It's one of the things that tripped me up badly when I was
>>>>>> failing to rewrite the chunk allocator last year.
>>>>>
>>>>> Yeah, right now there's no persistent default for the allocator. I'm
>>>>> still hoping that the object properties will magically solve that.
>>>>
>>>>     There's no obvious place that filesystem-wide properties can be
>>>> stored, though. There's a userspace tool to manipulate the few current
>>>> FS-wide properties, but that's all special-cased to use the
>>>> "historical" ioctls for those properties, with no generalisation of a
>>>> property store, or even (IIRC) any external API for them.
>>>>
>>>>     We're nominally using xattrs in the btrfs: namespace on directories
>>>> and files, and presumably on the top directory of a subvolume for
>>>> subvol-wide properties, but it's not clear where the FS-wide values
>>>> should go: in the top directory of subvolid=5 would be confusing,
>>>> because then you couldn't separate the properties for *that subvol*
>>> >from the ones for the whole FS (say, the default replication policy,
>>>> where you might want the top subvol to have different properties from
>>>> everything else).
>>> Possibly do special names for the defaults and store them there?  In
>>> general, I personally see little value in having some special
>>> 'default' properties however.
>>
>>     That would work.
>>
>>> The way I would expect things to work is that a new subvolume
>>> inherits it's properties from it's parent (if it's a snapshot),
>>
>>     Definitely this.
>>
>>> or
>>> from the next higher subvolume it's nested in.
>>
>>     I don't think I like this. I'm not quite sure why, though, at the
>> moment.
>>
>>     It definitely makes the process at the start of allocating a new
>> block group much more complex: you have to walk back up through an
>> arbitrary depth of nested subvols to find the one that's actually got
>> a replication policy record in it. (Because after this feature is
>> brought in, there will be lots of filesystems without per-subvol
>> replication policies in them, and we have to have some way of dealing
>> with those as well).
> ro-compat flag perhaps?
>>
>>     With an FS default policy, you only need check the current subvol,
>> and then fall back to the FS default if that's not found.
>>
>>     These things are, I think, likely to be lightly used: I would be
>> reasonably surprised to find more than two or possibly three storage
>> policies in use on any given system with a sane sysadmin.
>>
>>     I'm actually not sure what the interactions of multiple storage
>> policies are going to be like. It's entirely possible, particularly
>> with some of the more exotic (but useful) suggestions I've thought of,
>> that the behaviour of the FS is dependent on the order in which the
>> block groups are allocated. (i.e. "20 GiB to subvol-A, then 20 GiB to
>> subvol-B" results in different behaviour than "1 GiB to subvol-A then
>> 1 GiB to subvol-B and repeat"). I tried some simple Monte-Carlo
>> simulations, but I didn't get any concrete results out of it before
>> the end of the train journey. :)
> Yeah, I could easily see that getting complicated when you add in the
> (hopefully soon) possibility of n-copy replication.
On that note, it might be nice to have the ability to say 'store at 
least n copies of this data' in addition to being able to say 'store 
exactly this many copies of this data'. (could be really helpful for 
filesystems with differing device sizes).
>>
>>>   This would obviate
>>> the need for some special 'default' properties, and would be
>>> relatively intuitive behavior for a significant majority of people.
>>
>>     Of course, you shouldn't be nesting subvolumes anyway. It makes
>> it much harder to manage them.
> That depends though, I only ever do single nesting (ie, a subvolume in a
> subvolume), and I use it to exclude stuff from getting saved in
> snapshots (mostly stuff like clones of public git trees, or other stuff
> that's easy to reproduce without a backup).  Beyond that though, there
> are other inherent issues of course.