Re: [RFC][PATCH] ChunkFS: fs fission for faster fsck

David Lang
2007-04-24T19:02:05Z

On Tue, 24 Apr 2007, Nikita Danilov wrote:

> Amit Gud writes:
>
> Hello,
>
> >
> > This is an initial implementation of ChunkFS technique, briefly discussed
> > at: http://lwn.net/Articles/190222 and
> > http://cis.ksu.edu/~gud/docs/chunkfs-hotdep-val-arjan-gud-zach.pdf
>
> I have a couple of questions about chunkfs repair process.
>
> First, as I understand it, each continuation inode is a sparse file,
> mapping some subset of logical file blocks into block numbers. Then it
> seems, that during "final phase" fsck has to check that these partial
> mappings are consistent, for example, that no two different continuation
> inodes for a given file contain a block number for the same offset. This
> check requires scan of all chunks (rather than of only "active during
> crash"), which seems to return us back to the scalability problem
> chunkfs tries to address.

not quite.

this checking is a O(n^2) or worse problem, and it can eat a lot of memory in
the process. with chunkfs you divide the problem by a large constant (100 or
more) for the checks of individual chunks. after those are done then the final
pass checking the cross-chunk links doesn't have to keep track of everything, it
only needs to check those links and what they point to

any ability to mark a filesystem as 'clean' and then not have to check it on
reboot is a bonus on top of this.

David Lang

> Second, it is not clear how, under assumption of bugs in the file system
> code (which paper makes at the very beginning), fsck can limit itself
> only to the chunks that were active at the moment of crash.
>
> [...]
>
> >
> > Best,
> > AG
>
> Nikita.
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