Messages in this thread | | | From | "Chris Smith" <> | Subject | host (multibus) failover | Date | Fri, 14 May 1999 02:34:24 -0500 |
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Hi,
Okay, I just looked everywhere I could think of and didn't see anything mentioned about support in Linux for a multibus failover configuration. Basically, a disk would be accessible on several host adapters (SCSI adapters, whatever) and can be accessed through whichever ones work. This technique is used in (at least) VMS and NT to get more redundancy in several high-end storage systems, Digital StorageWorks being the one I know about. I'm interested in implementing this for Linux, but a few questions first.
1. Is this done? Did I miss it somewhere? I'd hate to duplicate someone's work.
2. I'm planning on adding some sort of new virtual block device on a new major number that can be associated with a list of physical block devices via (ioctl / proc filesystem) and forwards all access requests to the currently preferred path. A failure would simply cause the next available path to become preferred. This looks like it'll work okay. Anyone see problems with this approach, or a better way?
3. Anyone have hardware that they can test this on? I don't, so if you do and care about this, let me know. I'll e-mail you when I have something to test.
I'd like to emphasize that this isn't gonna be done some time soon. I'm just getting started with kernel hacking, and this just looked like something cool to work on that actually has a point. If people are really interested I'll try to get it done, but no guarantees.
Thanks,
Chris Smith <cd_smith@ou.edu>
PS: Please CC replies if convenient -- I'm subscribed to the list digest, but I'll see direct mail a lot sooner.
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