From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <4FE97CD6.70707@redhat.com> Date: Tue, 26 Jun 2012 11:11:50 +0200 From: Zdenek Kabelac MIME-Version: 1.0 References: <4FE8770C.7090502@shiftmail.org> <20120625162703.GC17857@agk-dp.fab.redhat.com> In-Reply-To: <20120625162703.GC17857@agk-dp.fab.redhat.com> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: [linux-lvm] Still missing for supporting dm-thin Reply-To: LVM general discussion and development List-Id: LVM general discussion and development List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , List-Id: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format="flowed" To: Spelic , linux-lvm@redhat.com Dne 25.6.2012 18:27, Alasdair G Kergon napsal(a): > On Mon, Jun 25, 2012 at 04:34:52PM +0200, Spelic wrote: >> 1) It is not possible to backup and restore a VG config (vgcfgrestore in >> particular refuses to work) if there is a dm-thin volume. This is a very >> serious problem that does not allow to recover even non-thin volumes if >> there is a thin volume around. Even automatic backups from >> /etc/lvm/archive cannot be restored/used. This puts data at risk, please >> fix this. > > We do want to find a way to do this for non-thin volumes - the current > restrictions are indeed tighter than they need to be. > > For thin volumes though it's a complex problem to work out what can > be restored safely and what can't. (The metadata saying where a volume is is > now split between the LVM metadata and the thin metadata.) We need history also for all LVs used by thin-pool - so currently the safest is to disable restore until we are sure we could provide some solution, where the user does not easily break whole VG in non-repairable way. > >> 2) less important: it is apparently not possible to change the --zero >> flag for a thin pool once created. > > That should be just another lvchange parameter. > While going from --zero mode to non zero is quite ok, the opposite direction might have unexpected side effects. If the block were provisioned in the non-zero mode - they may have random pool content on unwritten data areas - thus if user may arbitrarily switch between zeroing type - the content would be unpredictable, and we would need to keep this as some history flag - once the pool was started without zeroing, we may not guarantee, provisioned unwritten data blocks will have zero content. So for full support we have to make clear, how we will keep history info - i.e. to avoid bugreports where the weird data will be received in the zero mode. (something like tainted kernel ?) It is getting even more complex when I play with discard options... Zdenek