[DRBD-user] Re: MD Raid-0 over DRBD or DRBD over MD Raid-0

Rick Rothstein rickrsr2 at yahoo.com
Sat Feb 17 01:58:37 CET 2007

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


Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer at ...> writes:

> 
> On 2/15/07, Greg Freemyer <greg.freemyer at ...> wrote:
> <snip>
> > As to:
> >
> > "You can stack DRBD on top of md, md on top of DRBD is nonsense, however".
> >
> > I still don't know why that is true in a active-passive setup.  It
> > seems totally logical to me to stack md raid0 above drbd raid1 in a
> > active-passive setup, but that may be different thread.
> >
> I was thinking some more about this and I believe the issue is with
> ordered writes.
> 
> IIRC, drbd provides 3 modes of operation related to ordered writes.
> By stacking a raid layer above drbd you break its ability to control
> ordered writes because no single instance of drbd sees the whole
> picture.  I'm not a drbd expert, but if you look at the 3 modes you
> can probably see why it would be bad even in a active passive setting.
> 
> Greg
I'm thinking (hoping?), that because each separate DRBD will preserve the 
correct write ordering of its chunk of the raid-0 stripe; the overall write 
ordering of the entire stripe will also be preserved.

I guess that I'm just going to have to dig into the combinitorial discussion 
in the DRBD docs; and then, of course there's tons of testing to do.

_Rick







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