Hi, I got the possibility to work on dm-mirror as a final year project at ULX, the Hungarian distributor of Red Hat. Get my feet wet, I created two small patches: 1) dm-mirror: allow setting ios count to 0 Always read from the default_mirror in that case. 2) dm-mirror: allow setting the default mirror These can help in case one data leg of a mirror is a remote (iSCSI) one, so the default RR aproach is not optimal for reading. (One may set the ios count to 0, set the default mirror to the local one, and that will cause a read speedup.) I do not yet have the right to send those patches (I do this in university time, so the copyright is not mine), but I hope to be able to do so - to get them reviewed. So the final year project's aim is to improve "the fault tolerance and performance of dm-mirror". We (I and my mentors) have two ideas in that area, not counting the above patches: 1) Make the currently hardwired RR read approach modular, that would allow implementing for example a weighted RR algorithm. (In case one disk is two times faster than the other one, etc.) 2) From our experiments, it seems that in case the dm-mirror looses one of its legs and there is a write to the mirror, it gets converted to a linear volume. It would be nice (not sure how easy) to use the mirror log to mark the dirty blocks, so that the volume would not be converted to a linear one: once the other leg is back, it could be updated based on the mirror log. The question: what do you (who have much more experience with dm-mirror than me) think - are these reasonable goals? If not, what would you improve/change/add/remove to the above list? Thanks, Miklos PS: Sorry if this is a duplicate, first I did not subscribe to the list. -- dm-devel mailing list dm-devel@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/dm-devel
