Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1764919AbZDJMNw (ORCPT ); Fri, 10 Apr 2009 08:13:52 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S1756548AbZDJMMu (ORCPT ); Fri, 10 Apr 2009 08:12:50 -0400 Received: from mail09.linbit.com ([212.69.161.110]:39886 "EHLO mail09.linbit.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751935AbZDJMMs (ORCPT ); Fri, 10 Apr 2009 08:12:48 -0400 From: Philipp Reisner To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Cc: Jens Axboe , Greg KH , Neil Brown , James Bottomley , Andi Kleen , Sam Ravnborg , Dave Jones , Nikanth Karthikesan , "Lars Marowsky-Bree" , "Nicholas A. Bellinger" , Lars Ellenberg , Philipp Reisner Subject: [PATCH 00/14] DRBD: a block device for HA clusters Date: Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:12:11 +0200 Message-Id: <1239365545-10356-1-git-send-email-philipp.reisner@linbit.com> X-Mailer: git-send-email 1.5.6.3 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 4292 Lines: 105 Hi, This is a repost of DRBD, to keep you updated about the ongoing cleanups and improvements. Patch set attached. Git tree available: git pull git://git.drbd.org/linux-2.6-drbd.git drbd Description DRBD is a shared-nothing, synchronously replicated block device. It is designed to serve as a building block for high availability clusters and in this context, is a "drop-in" replacement for shared storage. Simplistically, you could see it as a network RAID 1. Although I use the "RAID1+NBD" metaphor myself, recent discussion unveiled that one needs to understand the differences as well. Here are just two examples of that: 1) Think of a two node HA cluster. Node A is active ('primary' in DRBD speak) has the filesystem mounted and the application running. Node B is in standby mode ('secondary' in DRBD speak). We loose network connectivity, the primary node continues to run, the secondary no longer gets updates. Then we have a complete power failure, both nodes are down. Then they power up the data center again, but at first the get only the power circuit of node B up and running again. Should node B offer the service right now ? ( DRBD has configurable policies for that ) Later on they manage to get node A up and running again, now lets assume node B was chosen to be the new primary node. What needs to be done ? Modifications on B since it became primary needs to be resynced to A. Modifications on A sind it lost contact to B needs to be taken out. DRBD does that. How do you fit that into a RAID1+NBD model ? NBD is just a block transport, it does not offer the ability to exchange dirty bitmaps or data generation identifiers, nor does the RAID1 code has a concept of that. 2) When using DRBD over small bandwidth links, one has to run a resync, DRBD offers the option to do a "checksum based resync". Similar to rsync it at first only exchanges a checksum, and transmits the whole data block only if the checksums differ. That again is something that does not fit into the concepts of NBD or RAID1. DRBD can also be used in dual-Primary mode (device writable on both nodes), which means it can exhibit shared disk semantics in a shared-nothing cluster. Needless to say, on top of dual-Primary DRBD utilizing a cluster file system is necessary to maintain for cache coherency. More background on this can be found in this paper: http://www.drbd.org/fileadmin/drbd/publications/drbd8.pdf Beyond that, DRBD addresses various issues of cluster partitioning, which the MD/NBD stack, to the best of our knowledge, does not solve. The above-mentioned paper goes into some detail about that as well. DRBD can operate in synchronous mode, or in asynchronous mode. I want to point out that we guarantee not to violate a single possible write after write dependency when writing on the standby node. More on that can be found in this paper: http://www.drbd.org/fileadmin/drbd/publications/drbd_lk9.pdf Last not least DRBD offers background resynchronisation and keeps a on disk representation of the dirty bitmap up-to-date. A reasonable tradeoff between number of updates, and resyncing more than needed is implemented with the activity log. More on that: http://www.drbd.org/fileadmin/drbd/publications/drbd-activity-logging_v6.pdf Changes since the post on 2009-03-30, all triggered by reviews * Improvements to Makefile and Kconfig * Simplified definitions of bm_flags' bitnumbers * Removed debugging aid Changes since the post on 2009-03-23, from drbd-mainline * Updated to the final drbd-8.3.1 code * Optionally run-length encode bitmap transfers Changes since the post on 2009-03-23, triggered by reviews * Using the latest proc_create() now * Moved the allocation of md_io_tmpp to attach/detach out of drbd_md_sync_page_io() * Removing the mode selection comments for emacs * Removed DRBD_ratelimit() cheers, Phil -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/