Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 12 Aug 2007 21:41:15 -0400 | From | Paul Clements <> | Subject | Re: [RFD] Layering: Use-Case Composers (was: DRBD - what is it, anyways? [compare with e.g. NBD + MD raid]) |
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Iustin Pop wrote: > On Sun, Aug 12, 2007 at 07:03:44PM +0200, Jan Engelhardt wrote: >> On Aug 12 2007 09:39, david@lang.hm wrote: >>> now, I am not an expert on either option, but three are a couple things that I >>> would question about the DRDB+MD option >>> >>> 1. when the remote machine is down, how does MD deal with it for reads and >>> writes? >> I suppose it kicks the drive and you'd have to re-add it by hand unless done by >> a cronjob.
Yes, and with a bitmap configured on the raid1, you just resync the blocks that have been written while the connection was down.
>>From my tests, since NBD doesn't have a timeout option, MD hangs in the > write to that mirror indefinitely, somewhat like when dealing with a > broken IDE driver/chipset/disk.
Well, if people would like to see a timeout option, I actually coded up a patch a couple of years ago to do just that, but I never got it into mainline because you can do almost as well by doing a check at user-level (I basically ping the nbd connection periodically and if it fails, I kill -9 the nbd-client).
>>> 2. MD over local drive will alternate reads between mirrors (or so I've been >>> told), doing so over the network is wrong. >> Certainly. In which case you set "write_mostly" (or even write_only, not sure >> of its name) on the raid component that is nbd. >> >>> 3. when writing, will MD wait for the network I/O to get the data saved on the >>> backup before returning from the syscall? or can it sync the data out lazily >> Can't answer this one - ask Neil :) > > MD has the write-mostly/write-behind options - which help in this case > but only up to a certain amount.
You can configure write_behind (aka, asynchronous writes) to buffer as much data as you have RAM to hold. At a certain point, presumably, you'd want to just break the mirror and take the hit of doing a resync once your network leg falls too far behind.
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