Originally posted by make_adobe_on_Linux!
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Also thinking ZFS developer were given heads up about SMR drives
Yes this is 2014 and ZFS currently does not have a roadmap even to support SMR yet. Same changes to support SMR drives has to happen to support ZNS drives.\
Remember we are over 6 years in on this zoned storage problem. ZFS has not started the work. File systems like XFS started 5 years ago working on fixing up items for zoned storage and are not ready yet. Yes if ZFS developers start now it could be over a decade before they have something ready.
Originally posted by make_adobe_on_Linux!
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Originally posted by markg85
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However, support for host managed zoned block devices is not provided as some fundamental ext4 design aspects cannot be easily changed to match host managed device constraints.
Yes Ext4 will be option on ZNS and SMR drives but ext4 will be sitting on top of dm-zoned so you still have lot of the problems of device managed SMR or existing SSD plus now extra CPU overhead as well. Of course there is still work altering ext4 operations to play better with dm-zoned being under it.
Its the F2FS, BTRFS and XFS that are working on full Zoned Block Devices support. Mind you in place conversion from ext2-4 to BTRFS is possible explains lot of interest in btrfs performance.
Please note XFS is taking a while to get perfectly done for zoned block devices as well as it requiring on disc changes.
Its also not exactly auto enabled if you have a pure host managed SMR HDD or ZNS SSD you will not be able to use those devices unless you have support for the zoned storage tech. Host aware versions of SMR HDD and ZNS SSD it might be possible to auto enable after the fact. We are not sure if host aware ZNS SSD will even exist. ZNS could be a pure choice between device managed SSD as we are use to and host managed ZNS SSD with nothing in the middle. Of course the ZNS SSD could be cheap and perform well if you have software that supports it due to not requiring the DRAM device managed SSD does.
Distributions deciding not to support ZNS will also not be supporting SMR HDD properly either. Yes that is another party I did not mention Distributions will have to update their install process to support Zoned blocked devices. Us installing and setting up drives will have to get use to a few slightly different processes.
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