Hello (most likely Hello Neil :)), are md and mdadm able to deal correctly with internal bitmaps of non-standard size, i.e. a 132k internal bitmap? As far as I can see from the code it should be possible. v1 superblocks store the offset and size of data, bitmap superblocks store the bitmap chunk size, which, in turn, is used to determine the number of blocks to read as bitmap data. Modifying mdadm to set up a non-standard bitmap size would also be easy: change choose_bm_space(), recompile, create array, done. This would just increase sb->data_offset or decrease sb->data_size a little. However, I'm not sure, if really everything in md and mdadm is able to deal with such a "non-standard" superblock and what would happen on subsequent operations like mdadm --grow using an unpatched mdadm? The reason for me to ask is: When using a chunking RAID level ([0456], 10), there is usually some space cut at the end of component devices which remains unusable because it is too small to contain a chunk. For example, by using unpartitioned 1.5T = 1465138584k component devices and v1.1 superblocks there is a space cut of 20k with 32k-256k chunk size (even 276k with 512k chunks). When using internal bitmaps, depending on the device size more or less of the available bitmap space is really used. For example, the internal bitmap of a 3*1.5T RAID gets 8192KB chunks and uses 536550 bits out of the 1048576 available (if my calculations are correct :)) - 51%. If it would be possible to add some of the space cut from RAID chunking to the internal bitmap, one could optimize the bitmap chunk size. In the above example, by adding 4k to the internal bitmap the bitmap chunk size could be decreased to 4096KB and 1073100 of the then 1081344 available bits would be used - 99%. Of course, this is not always possible, i.e. a 4*1.5T RAID has a bitmap usage/available ratio of 68% - the 20k space cut wouldn't be enough here to optimize it. I'm not sure if it's worth the effort to automate such optimizations, but being able to do them manually at least would be great. regards Mario -- Tower: "Say fuelstate." Pilot: "Fuelstate." Tower: "Say again." Pilot: "Again." Tower: "Arghl, give me your fuel!" Pilot: "Sorry, need it by myself..." -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
