From: Ted Ts'o Subject: Re: Ext4 and xfs problems in dm-thin on allocation and discard Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2012 10:19:33 -0400 Message-ID: <20120619141933.GC10637@thunk.org> References: <4FDF9EBE.2030809@shiftmail.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE Cc: Spelic , xfs@oss.sgi.com, linux-ext4@vger.kernel.org, device-mapper development To: =?utf-8?B?THVrw6HFoQ==?= Czerner Return-path: Received: from li9-11.members.linode.com ([67.18.176.11]:51276 "EHLO imap.thunk.org" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1751272Ab2FSOTi (ORCPT ); Tue, 19 Jun 2012 10:19:38 -0400 Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: Sender: linux-ext4-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: On Tue, Jun 19, 2012 at 04:09:48PM +0200, Luk=C3=A1=C5=A1 Czerner wrote= : >=20 > With thin provisioning you'll get totally different file system > layout than on fully provisioned disk as you push more and more > writes to your drive. This unfortunately has great impact on > performance since file systems usually have a lot of optimization on > where to put data/metadata on the drive and how to read them. > However in case of thinly provisioned storage those optimization > would not help. And yes, you just have to expect lower performance > with dm-thin from the file system on top of it. It is not and it > will never be ideal solution for workloads where you expect the best > performance. One of the things which would be nice to be able to easily set up is a configuration where we get the benefits of thin provisioning with respect to snapshost, but where the underlying block device used by the file system is contiguous. That is, it would be really useful to *not* use thin provisioning for the underlying file system, but to use thin provisioned snapshots. That way we only pay the thinp performance penalty for the snapshots, and not for normal file system operations. This is something that would be very useful both for ext4 and xfs. I talked to Alasdair about this a few months ago at the Collab Summit, and I think it's doable today, but it was somewhat complicaed to set up. I don't recall the details now, but perhaps someone who's more familiar device mapper could outline the details, and perhaps we can either simplify it or abstract it away in a convenient front-end script? - Ted -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ext4" i= n the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html