Re: UI issues around RAID1

Andrey Kuzmin
2009-11-17T20:23:37Z

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 6:25 PM, jim owens <jowens@hp.com> wrote:
> <snip>
> So we know the "raw free blocks", but can not guarantee
> "how many raw blocks per new user write-block" will be
> consumed because we do not know what topology will be
> in effect for a new write.
>
> We could cheat and use "worst-case topology" numbers
> if all writes are the current default raid. =A0Of course
> this ignores DUP unless it is set on the whole filesystem.
>
> And we also have the problem of metadata - which is dynamic
> and allocated in large chunks and has a DUP type, how do we
> account for that in worst-case calculations.
>
> The worst-case is probably wrong but may be more useful to
> people to know when they will run out of space. Or at least
> it might make some of our ENOSPC complaints go away :)
>
> Only "raw" and "worst-case" can be explained to users and
> which we report is up to Chris. =A0Today we report "raw".
>
> After spending 10 years on a multi-volume filesystem that
> had (unsolvable) confusing df output, I'm just of the
> opinion that nothing we do will make everyone happy.

df is user-centric, and therefore is naturally expected to return
used/available _logical_ capacity (how this translates to used
physical space is up to file-system-specific tools to find
out/report). Returning raw is counter-intuitive and causes surprise
similar to that of Roland.

With so flexible, down to per-file, topology configuration the only
option I see for df to return logical capacity available is to compute
the latter off the file-system object for which df is invoked. For
instance, 'df /path/to/some/file' could return logical capacity for
the mountpoint where some-file resides, computed from underlying
physical capacity available _and_ topology for this file. 'df
/mount-point' would under this implementation return available
logical capacity assuming default topology for the referenced
file-system.

As to used logical space accounting, this is file-system-specific and
I'm not yet familiar enough with btrfs code-base to argument for any
approach.

Regards,
Andrey
>
> But feel free to run a patch proposal by Chris.
>
> jim
>
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