[DRBD-user] drbd + flashcache

Pascal BERTON pascal.berton3 at free.fr
Sun Feb 12 18:44:31 CET 2012

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


>On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 7:30 PM, Pascal BERTON <pascal.berton3 at free.fr>
wrote:
>> Florian,
>>
>> I've watched your video, very interesting indeed... Unfortunately for you
it
>> raised some more questions to me :-)
>> First, just to be sure I correctly understood : flashcache will only (But
>> significantly) improve read operations, no impact or so on writes right ?

>It's a write-back capable device, so if you configure it in that mode,
>of course it will have an impact on writes.

Ah right, I remember you mentioned it in the video now...

>> Then, a year or 2 ago I had the opportunity to play around with Ming
Zhao's
>> dm-cache (completely apart from DRBD by the way, it was a standalone
>> system), and to what I remember it roughly looked like this flashcache
thing
>> I didn't know of, except it makes use of a ramdisk instead of an SSD
drive
>> (And it has an impact on write operations, as far as I remember). I
>> immediately see one advantage compared to flash-cache : it would
(should?)
>> be more performant, being memory-based instead of IO-based. However,
>> inconvenient, it would be certainly smaller.
>> Have you ever had the chance to add that dm-cache feature to DRBD the way
>> you did it with flashcache ? Do you know/think it would work efficiently
>> with DRBD ? And, lastly, do you think it would make sense to think of
>> combining dm-cache and flashcache together to get kind of an L1+L2
storage
>> cache level pair ?

>As far as I'm informed there are currently three generic block-layer
>caching devices available on Linux: flashcache, dm-cache and bcache.
>Of those, only bcache seemed to be seriously interested in a push
>towards mainline until recently (though that may be changing). As for
>myself I have zero experience with bcache and dm-cache, so flashcache
>is the only one I can comment on.

>Hope this helps. What's your intended use case?

Oh, simply get faster and faster... :) Any brick that allows me to improve
perfs is of potential interest to me. Especially in virtualization where
storage perf is key. BTW, I didn't know of bcache either, so that's another
one I have to dig into.

Thanks for your answers!

Best regards,

Pascal.

>Cheers,
>Florian

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