LWN.net Logo

Journal-guided RAID resync

Journal-guided RAID resync

Posted Nov 27, 2009 1:14 UTC (Fri) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359)
In reply to: Journal-guided RAID resync by nix
Parent article: Journal-guided RAID resync

You only have "instant corruption" if the array becomes degraded before the parity gets corrected. For this reason mdadm will not assemble an array which is both dirty and degraded. I thought I had mentioned this in my original comment, but apparently not. Maybe this is the case implied in the original article, though I don't think the text really matches reality: Either there is a correct fix that is trivial, or no fix is possible.

(The only two ways to avoid corruption when a crash happens on a degraded array are 1/ to journal updates at the raid level, or 2/ use a copy-on-write filesystem that knows about the stripe size and only ever writes into a stripe that does not contain any important information.).


(Log in to post comments)

Journal-guided RAID resync

Posted Nov 27, 2009 6:56 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Aaah, I see (actually whenever you mention this I get it for a few minutes
and then it blurs out of memory again). Yes, that makes sense: if you
don't lose a disk, you have two intact stripes and one stripe containing
not-yet-written garbage: whether that's the parity stripe or not is
immaterial.

So the thing to be worried about here is that RAID-5 only really protects
you from a single disk failure if your array is not being written to (or
is battery-backed).

And I suspect this is the case the article was discussing.

Copyright © 2013, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds