Re: the " 'official' point of view" expressed by kernelnewbies.org regarding reiser4 inclusion

Hans Reiser
2006-08-05T02:02:19Z

Antonio Vargas wrote:

> On 8/4/06, Edward Shishkin <edward@namesys.com> wrote:
>
>> Hans Reiser wrote:
>> > Edward Shishkin wrote:
>> >
>> >
>> >>Matthias Andree wrote:
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>>On Tue, 01 Aug 2006, Hans Reiser wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >>>>You will want to try our compression plugin, it has an ecc for every
>> >>>>64k....
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >>>
>> >>>What kind of forward error correction would that be,
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>Actually we use checksums, not ECC. If checksum is wrong, then run
>> >>fsck - it will remove the whole disk cluster, that represent 64K of
>> >>data.
>> >
>> >
>> > How about we switch to ecc, which would help with bit rot not
>> sector loss?
>>
>> Interesting aspect.
>>
>> Yes, we can implement ECC as a special crypto transform that inflates
>> data. As I mentioned earlier, it is possible via translation of key
>> offsets with scale factor > 1.
>>
>> Of course, it is better then nothing, but anyway meta-data remains
>> ecc-unprotected, and, hence, robustness is not increased..
>>
>> Edward.
>>
>> >
>> >>
>> >> and how much and
>> >>
>> >>
>> >>>what failure patterns can it correct? URL suffices.
>> >>>
>> >>
>> >>Checksum is checked before unsafe decompression (when trying to
>> >>decompress incorrect data can lead to fatal things). It can be
>> >>broken because of many reasons. The main one is tree corruption
>> >>(for example, when disk cluster became incomplete - ECC can not
>> >>help here). Perhaps such checksumming is also useful for other
>> >>things, I didnt classify the patterns..
>> >>
>> >>Edward.
>> >>
>> >>
>
>
> Would the storage + plugin subsystem support storing >1 copies of the
> metadata tree?
>
>
I suppose....

What would be nice would be to have a plugin that when a node fails its
checksum/ecc it knows to get it from another mirror, and which generally
handles faults with a graceful understanding of its ability to get
copies from a mirror (or RAID parity calculation).

I would happily accept such a patch (subject to usual reservation of
right to complain about implementation details).