[DRBD-user] New Idea - quick zeroing: good or bad?

Igor Yu. Zhbanov bsg at uniyar.ac.ru
Fri Mar 31 19:22:01 CEST 2006

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


Hello!

Performing initial sync on big volumes is a time-consuming operation.
Is it possible to use a special value of generation counters to mark that
certain block consists of only zero bytes? So when accessing to that block
DRBD just return block of zeroes instead of real reading block from disk.
And when someone writes anything to that block, it become an ordinary block.

So, by using spicial command initial sync (when using clean drives) will be
instant.

The only price of this is that we losing ability to access lower device
directly without DRBD. But accessing device directly is certainly bad idea. ;-)

What do you think?




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