Asdo <asdo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > rj wrote: >> Hi, >> I wanted to know if md solves write hole issue for RAID5/RAID6? It is unsolvable without a crash persistant journal. Hardware raids have battery backed cache for that but a fast disk would also work. But no support for this in linux software raid. > No but the filesystem can do that, ext3/4 and XFS in particular, if > well aligned on the RAID, if you are creating new files and not > updating old files (i.e. doesn't work for databases). > For full write hole avoidance you need to wait for Btrfs (and I don't > know the state of raid-5/6 on btrfs), or use ZFS on Solaris or Freebsd. No raid5/6 in btrfs. Needs major restructuring of the on-disk data for that. ZFS on the other hand uses what they call raid-x. Which is a raid5 with copy-on-write semantic. Any write to a virtual block will write to a new physical block and update the parity to a new physical block too. Only once that was written is the stripe atomically changed to the new physical location. So no hole there. There is also a zfs-fuse implementation for linux. >> Also, does md support RAID 50 level ? >> > Not directly, but you can create that manually by overlaying a raid 0 > over 1+ raid5's. And by layering one raid over others you can get any level you like, even 14065 if you like (and have enought disks). For raid50 I would suggest LVM over raid5 with striping though. Raid 0 is somewhat pointless when compared with all the extra flexibility LVM gives you on top of striping. MfG Goswin -- 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