[ ... ] >> If you were in my place with the resource constraints, you'd >> go with: xfs with barriers on top of mdraid10 with device >> cache ON and setting vm/dirty_bytes, vm/dirty_background_bytes, >> vm/dirty_expire_centisecs, vm/dirty_writeback_centisecs to >> safe values > If you ever experienced a crash where lots of sensible and > important data were lost, you would not even think about > "device cache ON". It is not as simple as that... *If* hw barriers are implemented *and* applications do the right things, that is not a concern. Disabling the device cache is just a way to turn barriers on for everything. Indeed the whole rationale for having the 'barrier' option is to let the device caches on, and the OP did ask how to test that barriers actually work. Since even most consumers level drives currently implement barriers correctly, the biggest problem today, as per the O_PONIES discussions, is applications that don't do the right thing, and therefore the biggest risk is large amounts of dirty pages in system memory (either NFS client or server), not in the drive caches. Since the Linux flusher parameters are/have been demented, I have seen one or more GiB of dirty pages in system memory (on hosts I didn't configure...), which also causes performance problems. Again, as a crassly expedient thing, working around the lack of "do the right thing" in applications by letting only a few seconds of dirty pages accumulate in system memory seems to fool enough users (and many system administrators and application developers) into thinking that stuff is "safe". It worked well enough for 'ext3' for many years, quite regrettably. Note: 'ext3' has also had the "helpful" issue of excessive impact of flushing, which made 'fsync' performance terrible, but improved the apparent safety for "optimistic" applications. -- 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
