GRUB Now Supports Btrfs 3/4-Copy RAID1 Profiles (RAID1C3 / RAID1C4 On Linux 5.5+)

[phoronix]

Phoronix: GRUB Now Supports Btrfs 3/4-Copy RAID1 Profiles (RAID1C3 / RAID1C4 On Linux 5.5+)

When it comes to the storage/file-system changes with the in-development Linux 5.5 kernel one of the most prominent end-user-facing changes is more robust RAID1 for Btrfs with the ability to have three or four copies of the data rather than just two copies, should data safety be of utmost importance and concerned over the possibility of two disks in an array failing...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GRUB-Btrfs-RAID1-3-4-Copies

[starshipeleven]

There is also in the works a "btrfs will write to a degraded array without creating SINGLE chunks" so that when you replace the dead drive you don't need to do a balance before the scrub.

https://patchwork.kernel.org/cover/11231915/

[waxhead]

Except for improved redundancy the real cool thing about BTRFS Raid1c4 for example will be that you will get a impressive improvement for parallell reads in the future when btrfs learn to distribute reads to the least busy/fastest device in the storage pool

[pal666]

Except for improved redundancy the real cool thing about BTRFS Raid1c4 for example will in time be that you will get a impressive improvement for parallell reads in time when btrfs learn to distribute reads to the least busy/fastest device in the storage pool

it should be possible to distribute chunks(and reads) to all drives with any redundancy level

[starshipeleven]

it should be possible to distribute chunks(and reads) to all drives with any redundancy level

Yes but if you have 3 or 4 copies of the same data you can read from 3 or 4 drives at the same time instead than just from 2 (with normal RAID1).

Because no matter how you distribute them, you will have only 2 copies of the data you can read from in RAID1.

[Zan Lynx]

RAID10 already does multiple reads in btrfs. A six drive RAID10 will read three drives at a time.

[starshipeleven]

RAID10 already does multiple reads in btrfs.

Yes but we are talking of RAID1 and RAID1-like (i.e. pure mirroring) setups with more than 2 copies, which is a different setup from RAID10

RAID10 is mirroring and striping, and is "nested" raid. And its fault tolerance is weird and depends from the array size (the bigger the array the more drives it can lose, you can always lose a single drive and be fine) and some luck, while with a RAID1C4 profile you will always be able to lose up to 3 drives and be fine.

Would be interesting to see a performance comparison. RAID10 will of course scale better as with each drive pair you add things will change, but for small and medium sized setups these two new profiles should be competitive.

[waxhead]

Would be interesting to see a performance comparison. RAID10 will of course scale better as with each drive pair you add things will change, but for small and medium sized setups these two new profiles should be competitive.

I actually think that BTRFS "RAID"1c4 in many scenarios could scale better than RAID10 either it being BTRFS' native implementation or regular RAID10. In RAID10 like setups you have to make half the storage devices read it's part of the stripe at the same time, but with "RAID"1c3/4 you still just need to read from one device, leaving other devices free to service other reads or writes - this could especially be useful for storage devices with larger latency such as harddrives or even network block devices.

Again the workload would matter immensely, but theoretically it could rival RAID10 on performance and smoke it on reliability as well. Any RAID10 setup can potentially fail if you are unlucky enough to loose the "right" two disks.

[Zan Lynx]

RAID1 is worse for parallel reads because the chunks are not adjacent. If you are using 64 KB chunks and 4 stripes then disk 1 reads [0-64K], [256K-320K], disk 2 [64K-128K], [320K-384K], etc, etc. You are wasting 1/4th of your drive read bandwidth.

[starshipeleven]

RAID1 is worse for parallel reads because the chunks are not adjacent. If you are using 64 KB chunks and 4 stripes then disk 1 reads [0-64K], [256K-320K], disk 2 [64K-128K], [320K-384K], etc, etc. You are wasting 1/4th of your drive read bandwidth.

I'm not sure I understand what you are doing here.

You have 4 copies of the same data (the 4 "stripes" means this is a RAID1c4, a classic RAID1 has only 2 "stripes" when reading afaik) with only 2 drives, it's superfluous as you have no use for 2 copies of the data on the same drive in a multi-drive array.

In a best case scenario (btrfs detects this and reads only 2 stripes instead of 4) you are not really getting any performance change, in a worst case scenario (btrfs does not detect this) you swamp performance.

I was implicitly assuming each drive in the array has AT MOST a single full copy of the array's data, possibly less.
i.e. 2+ drives with a RAID1, 3+ drives with a RAID1c3, 4+ drives with a RAID1c4.