[DRBD-user] drbd is awesome: it mirrors reads, too!

Maurice Volaski mvolaski at aecom.yu.edu
Sun Aug 7 00:49:00 CEST 2005

Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.


Our internal 3ware RAID did something bad and the logs starting 
filling with scary errors:

Jul 31 03:10:15 [kernel] [1745925.523238] PCI-DMA: Out of IOMMU space 
for 16384 bytes at device 0000:03:01.0
Jul 31 03:10:15 [kernel] [1745925.524623] SCSI error : <0 0 0 0> 
return code = 0x70000
Jul 31 03:10:15 [kernel] [1745925.524626] end_request: I/O error, dev 
sda, sector 47586099

(I have changed the IOMMU allocation from 32 MB to 512 MB to address 
the issue, I hope)

One of the affected partitions is under drbd, but the rest is the 
root. Something somewhere made the root partition read-only. And it 
did so to the drbd partition too, but oddly nobody seems to be 
complaining they can't access the database on it.

When I switched to the secondary, I can see it got all the write I/O, 
thanks to drbd and protocol C, but then I got to wondering what about 
read I/O.

It can't logically be reading from the primary because the data there 
is no longer up to date, and I found this explanation in a previous 
mailing list message:


>  > And finally, does "DiskLessClient" really means "there is no local
>>  device to write to" ? Is that true for primary and secondary ?
>
>Yes. It means all actually IO goes via the peer; not only writes, but
>also reads.

So if I understand this correctly:

1) drbd is a true mirrored RAID for both writing AND reading.

2) I don't want to necessarily configure the OS or drbd to 
automatically kill the primary should the RAID start to fail. drbd 
will just use the secondary so long as the primary's OS and network 
are intact.

This fantastic feature ought to be noted in the documentation a bit 
more explicitly. I previously thought of drbd only in terms of the 
primary's failing globally requiring heartbeat intervention to 
produce a failover.

keywords: diskless disk less DiskLessClient ServerForDLess detach 
panic halt parity busfree RAID 1 failure misbehave misbehaving 
haywire psycho acting weird
-- 

Maurice Volaski, mvolaski at aecom.yu.edu
Computing Support, Rose F. Kennedy Center
Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University



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