Re: [PATCH, RFC 3/3] ext4: use the O_HOT and O_COLD open flags to influence inode allocation

[Ted Ts'o <tytso@mit.edu>]

On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 02:45:28PM -0500, Eric Sandeen wrote:
> 
> I'm curious to know how this will work for example on a linear device
> make up of rotational devices (possibly a concat of raids, etc).
> 
> At least for dm, it will be still marked as rotational,
> but the relative speed of regions of the linear device can't be inferred
> from the offset within the device.

Hmm, good point.  We need a way to determine whether this is some kind
of glued-together dm thing versus a plain-old HDD.

> Do we really have enough information about the storage under us to
> know what parts are "fast" and what parts are "slow?"

Well, plain and simple HDD's are still quite common; not everyone
drops in an intermediate dm layer.  I view dm as being similar to
enterprise storage arrays where we will need to pass down an explicit
hint with block ranges down to the storage device.  However, it's
going to be a long time before we get that part of the interface
plumbed in.

In the meantime, it would be nice if we had something that worked in
the common case of plain old stupid HDD's --- we just need a way of
determining that's what we are dealing with.

					- Ted