Re: [PATCH 1/4] md: Factor out RAID6 algorithms into lib/

[Alex Elsayed <eternaleye@gmail.com>]

Ric Wheeler wrote:

> On 07/17/2009 11:49 AM, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
>> Ric Wheeler wrote:
>>>>
>>>> The bottom line is pretty much this: the cost of changing the encoding
>>>> would appear to outweigh the benefit. I'm not trying to claim the Linux
>>>> RAID-6 implementation is optimal, but it is simple and appears to be
>>>> fast enough that the math isn't the bottleneck.
>>>
>>> Cost? Thank about how to get free grad student hours testing out
>>> things that you might or might not want to leverage on down the road :-)
>>>
>>
>> Cost, yes, of changing an on-disk format.
>>
>> -hpa
>>
> 
> Putting RAID6 behind us, we still might be interested in the other 
encodings 
> that are in:
> 
> "A Performance Evaluation and Examination of Open-Source Erasure Coding 
> Libraries For Storage"
> 
> http://www.cs.utk.edu/~plank/plank/papers/FAST-2009.html
> 
> since they give us even more flexibility....

Of course, there's also the fact that, using (essentially unchanged) the 
current code for Reed-Solomon coding, it's completely doable to have 
arbitrary NxM redundancy up to (N + M) < 256 disks (this limit is due to the 
current maximum of 8 for symsize [referred to as 'w' in the below paper] in 
rs_init. If increased to 16, the maximum number of disks would be 65535). 
It's also space-optimal for all combinations of N (checksum) and M (data).

http://www.cs.utk.edu/~plank/plank/papers/CS-96-332.html even describes an 
implementation _very_ similar to the current code, right down to using a 
table for the logarithm and inverse logarithm calculations.

Also, (referencing the earlier-posted paper comparing open-source coding 
techniques), Cauchy Reed-Solomon codes seem to maintain most of the benefits 
of the current system (including the ability to provide NxM redundancy, 
while still retaining the property of being space-optimal), with significant 
performance gains. It also provides an optimization for the RAID6 case, so 
once again the common case would get a benefit over less common cases (as 
with Mr. Anvin's RAID6 optimization in the current system)

However, I will have to dispute that the other methods provide more 
flexibility - Cauchy Reed-Solomon codes are at best a horizontal move there, 
and the other systems are restricted to (or at very least, far more 
effective in) RAID6 systems.