Re: [ANNOUNCE] DualFS: File System with Meta-data and Data Separation

Andi Kleen
2007-02-15T19:38:31Z

Juan Piernas Canovas <piernas@ditec.um.es> writes:

[playing devil's advocate here]

> If the data and meta-data devices of DualFS can be on different disks,
> DualFS is able to READ and WRITE data and meta-data blocks in
> PARALLEL.

XFS can do this too using its real time volumes (which don't contain
any metadata). It can also have a separate log.

Also many storage subsystems have some internal parallelism
in writing (e.g. a RAID can write on different disks in parallel for
a single partition) so i'm not sure your distinction is that useful.

If you stripe two disks with a standard fs versus use one of them
as metadata volume and the other as data volume with dualfs i would
expect the striped variant usually be faster because it will give
parallelism not only to data versus metadata, but also to all data
versus other data.

Also I would expect your design to be slow for metadata read intensive
workloads. E.g. have you tried to boot a root partition with dual fs?
That's a very important IO benchmark for desktop Linux systems.

-Andi