linux-kernel - Re: Mis-Design of Btrfs?

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Date:	Wed, 29 Jun 2011 10:29:53 +0100
From:	Ric Wheeler <rwheeler@...hat.com>
To:	NeilBrown <neilb@...e.de>
CC:	Nico Schottelius <nico-lkml-20110623@...ottelius.org>,
	LKML <linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org>,
	Chris Mason <chris.mason@...cle.com>,
	linux-btrfs <linux-btrfs@...r.kernel.org>,
	Alasdair G Kergon <agk@...hat.com>
Subject: Re: Mis-Design of Btrfs?

On 06/27/2011 07:46 AM, NeilBrown wrote:
> On Thu, 23 Jun 2011 12:53:37 +0200 Nico Schottelius
> <nico-lkml-20110623@...ottelius.org>  wrote:
>
>> Good morning devs,
>>
>> I'm wondering whether the raid- and volume-management-builtin of btrfs is
>> actually a sane idea or not.
>> Currently we do have md/device-mapper support for raid
>> already, btrfs lacks raid5 support and re-implements stuff that
>> has already been done.
>>
>> I'm aware of the fact that it is very useful to know on which devices
>> we are in a filesystem. But I'm wondering, whether it wouldn't be
>> smarter to generalise the information exposure through the VFS layer
>> instead of replicating functionality:
>>
>> Physical:   USB-HD   SSD   USB-Flash          | Exposes information to
>> Raid:       Raid1, Raid5, Raid10, etc.        | higher levels
>> Crypto:     Luks                              |
>> LVM:        Groups/Volumes                    |
>> FS:         xfs/jfs/reiser/ext3               v
>>
>> Thus a filesystem like ext3 could be aware that it is running
>> on a USB HD, enable -o sync be default or have the filesystem
>> to rewrite blocks when running on crypto or optimise for an SSD, ...
> I would certainly agree that exposing information to higher levels is a good
> idea.  To some extent we do.  But it isn't always as easy as it might sound.
> Choosing exactly what information to expose is the challenge.  If you lack
> sufficient foresight you might expose something which turns out to be
> very specific to just one device, so all those upper levels which make use of
> the information find they are really special-casing one specific device,
> which isn't a good idea.
>
>
> However it doesn't follow that RAID5 should not be implemented in BTRFS.
> The levels that you have drawn are just one perspective.  While that has
> value, it may not be universal.
> I could easily argue that the LVM layer is a mistake and that filesystems
> should provide that functionality directly.
> I could almost argue the same for crypto.
> RAID1 can make a lot of sense to be tightly integrated with the FS.
> RAID5 ... I'm less convinced, but then I have a vested interest there so that
> isn't an objective assessment.
>
> Part of "the way Linux works" is that s/he who writes the code gets to make
> the design decisions.   The BTRFS developers might create something truly
> awesome, or might end up having to support a RAID feature that they
> subsequently think is a bad idea.  But it really is their decision to make.
>
> NeilBrown
>

One more thing to add here is that I think that we still have a chance to 
increase the sharing between btrfs and the MD stack if we can get those changes 
made. No one likes to duplicate code, but we will need a richer interface 
between the block and file system layer to help close that gap.

Ric


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