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dm raid: document RAID 4/5/6 discard support

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For RAID 4/5/6 data integrity reasons 'discard_zeroes_data' must work
properly.

Signed-off-by: Heinz Mauelshagen <heinzm@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
This commit is contained in:
Heinz Mauelshagen 2015-08-25 17:15:41 +02:00 committed by Mike Snitzer
parent bd49784fd1
commit f15f4d7200
1 changed files with 31 additions and 0 deletions
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31
Documentation/device-mapper/dm-raid.txt
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@ -209,6 +209,37 @@ include:
"repair" - Initiate a repair of the array.
"reshape"- Currently unsupported (-EINVAL).
Discard Support
---------------
The implementation of discard support among hardware vendors varies.
When a block is discarded, some storage devices will return zeroes when
the block is read. These devices set the 'discard_zeroes_data'
attribute. Other devices will return random data. Confusingly, some
devices that advertise 'discard_zeroes_data' will not reliably return
zeroes when discarded blocks are read! Since RAID 4/5/6 uses blocks
from a number of devices to calculate parity blocks and (for performance
reasons) relies on 'discard_zeroes_data' being reliable, it is important
that the devices be consistent. Blocks may be discarded in the middle
of a RAID 4/5/6 stripe and if subsequent read results are not
consistent, the parity blocks may be calculated differently at any time;
making the parity blocks useless for redundancy. It is important to
understand how your hardware behaves with discards if you are going to
enable discards with RAID 4/5/6.
Since the behavior of storage devices is unreliable in this respect,
even when reporting 'discard_zeroes_data', by default RAID 4/5/6
discard support is disabled -- this ensures data integrity at the
expense of losing some performance.
Storage devices that properly support 'discard_zeroes_data' are
increasingly whitelisted in the kernel and can thus be trusted.
For trusted devices, the following dm-raid module parameter can be set
to safely enable discard support for RAID 4/5/6:
'devices_handle_discards_safely'
Version History
---------------
1.0.0 Initial version. Support for RAID 4/5/6