On Tue, Feb 15, 2011 at 01:19:33AM +0000, John Robinson wrote: > >Another approach to take would be to mark as dirty, on the fast devices, all > >areas being written to, and in the background continuously synch them to the > >slow devices, sequentially (marking as clean synched-and-as-yet-unwritten-to > >areas); so that the array would be resyncing continually, but be very fast > >for random writes. This would of course also require the bitmap to only be > >synchronously updated on the fast devices. > > > >Otoh, this is really a different mechanism from the current write-behind, > >aimed at a different use-case, so maybe it could be implemented > >orthogonally. (Patches welcome, I'm sure; it's times like these I hate not > >being a coder.) > > I wonder whether bcache might do roughly what you want? I haven't It only does very roughly what I want (the idea there is to _cache_ a much larger spinning disk using a relatively small SSD, whereas I basically want them both to be the same size, with the disk eventually mirroring the contents of the SSD); also, development of bcache has stalled (it doesn't even compile with recent kernels and the developer has stated that he's taking a break). I also know of flashcache, which is similar to bcache and is more actively developed, but is still lagging quite a few versions behind (the latest kernel it works with is 2.6.32, I think; it certainly doesn't compile with 2.6.38). So, while both of these may actually be good at what they do, neither of them does what I have in mind and I also can't use either of them because I need a newer kernel than what they support. But thanks anyway. -- Andras Korn <korn at elan.rulez.org> I'm not nearly as think as you confused I am. -- 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