Re: Can't reshape RAID1 to RAID5 due to chunk size

[NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de>]

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On Wed, 12 Sep 2012 10:59:56 +0600 Roman Mamedov <rm@romanrm.ru> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> # mdadm --detail /dev/md1 
> /dev/md1:
>         Version : 1.2
>   Creation Time : Fri May 27 09:50:54 2011
>      Raid Level : raid1
>      Array Size : 488372863 (465.75 GiB 500.09 GB)
>   Used Dev Size : 488372863 (465.75 GiB 500.09 GB)
>    Raid Devices : 2
>   Total Devices : 3
>     Persistence : Superblock is persistent
> 
>   Intent Bitmap : Internal
> 
>     Update Time : Wed Sep 12 10:54:33 2012
>           State : active 
>  Active Devices : 2
> Working Devices : 3
>  Failed Devices : 0
>   Spare Devices : 1
> 
>            Name : avdeb:1  (local to host avdeb)
>            UUID : e29a222d:e6245302:5ff3f834:ad471a01
>          Events : 26
> 
>     Number   Major   Minor   RaidDevice State
>        0       8       82        0      active sync   /dev/sdf2
>        1       8       34        1      active sync   /dev/sdc2
> 
>        2       8       50        -      spare   /dev/sdd2
> 
> # mdadm --grow /dev/md1 --chunk=64K --level=5 --raid-devices=3
> mdadm: New chunk size does not divide component size
> 
> -----
> Shouldn't mdadm be able to figure out a way to somehow proceed in this case? :)
> So what if it does not divide, I am increasing the array size by 33%, it
> has plenty of new space, why not leave a bit of it in the end of all devices so
> the chunk size does divide...
> Also I heard of cases (on #linux-raid IRC, I think) when people reshaped like
> this without specifying the chunk size explicitly, and ended up with something
> like a 4K chunk, which is certainly less than optimal.
> 

Yes, there is room for improvement here.

The difficulty is that the RAID1 must be converted to a 2-device RAID5 before
devices can be added, and the RAID5 must have a chunk size that is a multiple
of 4K.
Your array cannot even manage 1K.

Newer versions of mdadm will create raid1 arrays to be a multiple of 64K (I
think) so this will be less of a problem.

What you need to do is:
  - make sure the filesystem in /dev/md1 doesn't use the last 3k (it probably 
    uses a 4K block size, so cannot use that last bit
  - resize the array down to 488372860K  (mdadm -G /dev/md0 --size 488372860)
  - convert to a 2-device RAID5 with a 4K chunk size:
      mdadm -G /dev/md1 -c 4K -l5 -n2
  - convert to a 3-device RAID5 with a 64K chunk size:
      mdadm -G /dev/md1 -c 64k -n3

NeilBrown

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