BTRFS and ZFS as Layering Violations
LWN has an interesting article comparing recent developments in the Linux world to the “Unix Wars” that essentially killed every proprietary Unix system [1]. The article is really interesting and I recommend reading it, it’s probably only available to subscribers at the moment but should be generally available in a week or so (I used my Debian access sponsored by HP to read it).
A comment on that article cites my previous post about the reliability of RAID [2] and then goes on to disagree with my conclusion that using the filesystem for everything is the right thing to do.
The Benefits of Layers
I don’t believe as strongly in the BTRFS/ZFS design as the commentator probably thinks. The current way my servers (and a huge number of other Linux systems) work of having RAID to form a reliable array of disks from a set of cheap disks for the purpose of reliability and often capacity or performance is a good thing. I have storage on top of the RAID array and can fix the RAID without bothering about the filesystem(s) – and have done so in the past. I can also test the RAID array without involving any filesystem specific code. Then I have LVM running on top of the RAID array in exactly the same way that it runs on top of a single hard drive or SSD in the case of a laptop or netbook. So Linux on a laptop is much the same as Linux on a server in terms of storage once we get past the issue of whether a single disk or a RAID array is used for the LVM PV, among other things this means that the same code paths are used and I’m less likely to encounter a bug when I install a new system.
LVM provides multiple LVs which can be used for filesystems, swap, or anything else that uses storage. So if a filesystem gets badly corrupted I can umount it, create an LVM snapshot, and then take appropriate measures to try and fix it – without interfering with other filesystems.
When using layered storage I can easily add or change layers when it’s appropriate. For example I have encryption on only some LVs on my laptop and netbook systems (there is no point encrypting the filesystem used for .iso files of Linux distributions) and on some servers I use RAID-0 for cached data.
When using a filesystem like BTRFS or ZFS which includes subvolumes (similar in result to LVM in some cases) and internal RAID you can’t separate the layers. So if something gets corrupted then you have to deal with all the complexity of BTRFS or ZFS instead of just fixing the one layer that has a problem.
Update: One thing I forgot to mention when I first published this is the benefits of layering for some uncommon cases such as network devices. I can run an Ext4 filesystem over a RAID-1 array which has one device on NBD on another system. That’s a bit unusual but it is apparently working well for some people. The internal RAID on ZFS and BTRFS doesn’t support such things and using software RAID underneath ZFS or BTRFS loses some features.
When using DRBD you might have two servers with local RAID arrays, DRBD on top of that, and then an Ext4 filesystem. As any form of RAID other than internal RAID loses reliability features for ZFS and BTRFS that means that no matter how you might implement those filesystems with DRBD it seems that you will lose somehow. It seems that neither BTRFS nor ZFS supports a disconnected RAID mode (like a Linux software RAID with a bitmap so it can resync only the parts that didn’t change) so it’s not possible to use BTRFS or ZFS RAID-1 with an NBD device.
The only viable way of combining ZFS data integrity features with DRBD replication seems to be using a zvol for DRBD and then running Ext4 on top of that.
The Benefits of Integration
When RAID and the filesystem are separate things (with some added abstraction from LVM) it’s difficult to optimise the filesystem for RAID performance at the best of times and impossible in many cases. When the filesystem manages RAID it can optimise it’s operation to match the details of the RAID layout. I believe that in some situations ZFS will use mirroring instead of RAID-Z for small writes to reduce the load and that ZFS will combine writes into a single RAID-Z stripe (or set of contiguous RAID-Z stripes) to improve write performance.
It would be possible to have a RAID driver that includes checksums for all blocks, it could then read from another device when a checksum fails and give some of the reliability features that ZFS and BTRFS offer. Then to provide all the reliability benefits of ZFS you would at least need a filesystem that stores multiple copies of the data which would of course need checksums (because the filesystem could be used on a less reliable block device) and therefore you would end up with two checksums on the same data. Note that if you want to have a RAID array with checksums on all blocks then ZFS has a volume management feature (which is well described by Mark Round) [3]. Such a zvol could be used for a block device in a virtual machine and in an ideal world it would be possible to use one as swap space. But the zvol is apparently managed with all the regular ZFS mechanisms so it’s not a direct list of blocks on disk and thus can’t be extracted if there is a problem with ZFS.
Snapshots are an essential feature by today’s standards. The ability to create lots of snapshots with low overhead is a significant feature of filesystems like BTRFS and ZFS. Now it is possible to run BTRFS or ZFS on top of a volume manager like LVM which does snapshots to cover the case of the filesystem getting corrupted. But again that would end up with two sets of overhead.
The way that ZFS supports snapshots which inherit encryption keys is also interesting.
Conclusion
It’s technically possible to implement some of the ZFS features as separate layers, such as a software RAID implementation that put checksums on all blocks. But it appears that there isn’t much interest in developing such things. So while people would use it (and people are using ZFS ZVols as block devices for other filesystems as described in a comment on Mark Round’s blog) it’s probably not going to be implemented.
Therefore we have a choice of all the complexity and features of BTRFS or ZFS, or the current RAID+LVM+Ext4 option. While the complexity of BTRFS and ZFS is a concern for me (particularly as BTRFS is new and ZFS is really complex and not well supported on Linux) it seems that there is no other option for certain types of large storage at the moment.
ZFS on Linux isn’t a great option for me, but for some of my clients it seems to be the only option. ZFS on Solaris would be a better option in some ways, but that’s not possible when you have important Linux software that needs fast access to the storage.
- [1] http://lwn.net/Articles/494248/
- [2] http://etbe.coker.com.au/2012/02/06/reliability-raid/
- [3] http://www.markround.com/archives/37-ZFS-as-a-volume-manager.html
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Syndicated 2012-04-27 08:40:05 from etbe - Russell Cokeretbe - Russell Coker