On 23/10/2024 12:46, Geoff Back wrote:
Yes, raid1/raid10 write are the same. If you want to enable atomic write
for raid1/raid10, you must add a new branch to handle badblocks now,
otherwise, as long as one copy contain any badblocks, atomic write will
fail while theoretically I think it can work.
Can you please expand on what you mean by this last sentence, "I think
it can work".
Indeed, IMO, chance of encountering a device with BBs and supporting
atomic writes is low, so no need to try to make it work (if it were
possible) - I think that we just report EIO.
Thanks,
John
Hi all,
Looking at this from a different angle: what does the bad blocks system
actually gain in modern environments? All the physical storage devices
I can think of (including all HDDs and SSDs, NVME or otherwise) have
internal mechanisms for remapping faulty blocks, and therefore
unrecoverable blocks don't become visible to the Linux kernel level
until after the physical storage device has exhausted its internal
supply of replacement blocks. At that point the physical device is
already catastrophically failing, and in the case of SSDs will likely
have already transitioned to a read-only state. Using bad-blocks at the
kernel level to map around additional faulty blocks at this point does
not seem to me to have any benefit, and the device is unlikely to be
even marginally usable for any useful length of time at that point anyway.
It seems to me that the bad-blocks capability is a legacy from the
distant past when HDDs did not do internal block remapping and hence the
kernel could usefully keep a disk usable by mapping out individual
blocks in software.
If this is the case and there isn't some other way that bad-blocks is
still beneficial, might it be better to drop it altogether rather than
implementing complex code to work around its effects?
I am not proposing to drop it. That is another topic.
I am just saying that I don't expect BBs for a device which supports
atomic writes. As such, the solution for that case is simple - for an
atomic write which cover BBs in any rdev, then just error that write.
Of course I'm happy to be corrected if there's still a real benefit to
having it, just because I can't see one doesn't mean there isn't one.
I don't know if there is really a BB support benefit for modern devices
at all.
Thanks,
John
