On 02/16/2012 12:00 PM, Benjamin ESTRABAUD wrote:
On 14/02/12 20:53, Robert Woodworth wrote:
On 02/14/2012 01:42 PM, Joe Landman wrote:
On 02/14/2012 03:31 PM, NeilBrown wrote:
On Tue, 14 Feb 2012 10:30:37 -0700 Robert Woodworth
<robertjwoodworth@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Has anyone ever thought of integrating SES managed enclosures into
the
kernel RAID system? I briefly looked through the archives and have
not found anything on the topic.
Some HW based RAID controllers do this flawlessly now, there is no
reason why the kernel RAID cannot also. (LSI MegaRAID)
1) When a drive is part if a managed enclosure, the RAID system
should
address it by location instead of by enumerated device node. The SES
device in the enclosure can map the physical slot to a physical
drive.
The RAID admin (mdamd) should be able to add/fail/identify devices
based on slot.
Does this just mean that the admin should using names in
/dev/disk/by-path/
rather than /dev/sdXX to address devices? What can md or mdadm do
to help?
Not sure on the SES (or SGPIO side), but one of the things we've
been doing has been to create a file with disk placement
"coordinates", so as to map serial number and device to physical
location.
With real SES managed enclosures, you issue a SCSI command to read
SES Page1 and Page2 to get the details about the drives in any given
slot. This currently works fine in Linux with the sg_utils3
package. From the command line, 'sg_ses -p 2 /dev/sgXX` where the
device is the SES device.
Take a look at your systems, if you see a device at
/sys/class/enclosure/XXXX/ then you have a managed enclosure attached.
Hi,
True, but your definition of SES "slot 0" might be different from
someone else's. The end user will still need to map "slot 0" to a
physical slot on his system, instead of mapping a drive's serial
number to a physical slot. There is no standard for slot numbering and
most vendors use different schemes.
On the boxes I write SES firmware for, we have a sticker label on the
slot 'slot1' and its my job to make sure the SES firmware always maps
the physical label 'slot1' with the drive in that slot to the data in
the SCSI SES page 10 (0x0A).
That is the whole point of the SES device.
2) If the RAID system fails a drive, it should notify the SES
management and turn on the fail bit and the fail LED.
"mdadm --monitor" will run a script on drive failure. This could
easily
notify the SES management.
Yes, we are using this now for notifications and logging.
So maybe all we need here is a script to plug in to mdadm... Would
you like
to write one?
Just need a "standard" SES (or SGPIO) mechanism to hook into, and we
should be able to support this. Right now we have to work through
HBA scripts.
A true managed enclosure has nothing to do with the HBA. A managed
enclosure provides a device on the SCSI bus and you exclusively
communicate with that device regardless of the HBA. Most HW RAIDs
(LSI MegaRAID) will hide the SES device exactly like they hide the
physical disks.
3) The RAID system should be able to turn on the 'identify' bit and
LEDs for an array or a single drive.
This is fine too, as you pointed out SES gives you information on
disks, but in order to map a block device sda to a device in SES,
won't you need to rely on its SAS address? or even the SAS address
arbitrarily given by the expander to a SATA device?
Look at SCSI SES Page 10 (0x0A), that is the correct mapping of disk to
slot on the host side.
Your expander's SES device might display this address for both SAS and
SATA drives in SES page 0xa, but most SES devices won't, at least for
SATA drives, as the SES spec specifically requires SATA drive's
address to be set to 0x0.
So if drive "sd"a fails, you'll be able to tell which expander it is
attached using kernel infos, tell its SAS address as you see it, but
you won't be able to map it to a particular slot number in SES, and
will not be able to set its failed LED reliably.
As stated above. If the firmware on the SES enclosure is written
correctly the SES page1 and page2 will correctly map the physical
devices *and LEDs* to the devices in the SCSI SES pages. This does work
on proper enclosures, yes you can rely on it (on my boxes anyway).
Maybe people have bad experiences with bad firmware, but if you get a
box that my expanders and SES firmware is in, they will work correctly.
Again, it sounds like you just need a script to ask mdadm which
devices are
included in a given array, and then do whatever magic is needed to
turn on
the light.
It is fairly easy to extra the device list from the output of
mdadm --detail --brief --verbose /dev/md/whatever
but it might be good to make it easier to extra from
mdadm --detail --export /dev/md/whatever
Would you like to write such a script?
I'm currently doing firmware on a managed enclosure. Although my
vendor only supports LSI MegaRAID, there is no reason why my
enclosures cannot work in the same manner on a kernel RAID system.
Request for comments...
It sounds to me like you just need a few scripts to provide some
enclosure-specific functionality. I would be happy to include them
in the
mdadm distribution.
Or maybe there is something that I didn't understand??
Thanks,
NeilBrown
Regards,
Ben.
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