30 Jun 2011 robertc   » (Master)

dmraid (fakeraid) mirror + striped

While some folk look down on fakeraid (that is BIOS based RAID-until-OS-takes-over) solutions, I think they are pretty neat: they let a user get many of the benefits of dedicated controller cards at a fraction of the cost. The benefits include the usual ones for RAID – more spindles to handle IO, tolerance of disk failures. And unlike pure LVM solutions, you can boot from a degraded RAID 1 / 5 / 10 set because the BIOS knows how.

In some ways this is better than dedicated cards, because we have the software take over, so we can change the algorithms for IO dispatch all the way down to the individual devices :)

However, these RAID volumes are in a pretty awkward spot for installers and bootloaders: inside a running Linux environment they look like software RAID which cannot be depended on for booting, but at boot time they look like hard disks which cannot be looked under the hood.

I recently got a new desktop machine which has one of these motherboards, and fortuitously my old desktop I was replacing had the same size disks – so I had 4 disks and the option of using a RAID setup. Apparently I’m a sucker for punishment because I went for a RAID 10 (that is two RAID volumes made up of two-disk mirrors (the RAID 1 component), and then those two volumes are combined via striping (the RAID 0 component). This has the potential for pretty nice performance: in principle any read can come from one of 2 disks, and every 64KB (the stripe size) of linear data will switch to the other mirror set, giving a nice boost. Writes need to write to 2 disks always, but every 64KB worth of data will alternate mirror sets, also giving a boost.

Sadly we (Ubuntu) aren’t ready for this yet: there are two key bugs that make this layout almost impossible to install into. This blog post is for my exo-memory, I want to be able to figure out what I did next time around :) .

Firstly parted_devices, a helper used by Ubiquity and debian-installer to determine which block devices are actually disk drives that one can partition and install onto, has a confused heuristic – when dealing with dmraid it looks for devices which are not layered on other dmraid devices. This handily excludes partitions, but has the undesirable effect of excluding that striped device – because it is layered on the two mirrored devices. Bug 560748 was filed about that, and I’ve added a workaround to it – basically disabling the filtering, so its not suitable as a long term fix, but it will let one select the RAID volume correctly.

Secondly, grub2, which needs to figure out what the name at boot time of the RAID volume will be currently gets confused. I don’t know enough to really explain – and be correct in my explanation – but I do have a fugly patch which worked for me. Bug 803658 tracks this defect. The basic approach I took was to say that dmraid devices should be an abstraction layer we don’t peek under: if it claims to be a disk, well then its a disk. As grub does actually work that way  - it talks to INT 13h – the BIOS support for booting off of the RAID volume is entirely sufficient.

Sadly neither bug is at the point where the patches can be rolled into Ubuntu itself, but the workaround should let folk get up and running.

In both cases, build the package locally in the installer, install it, then after than run ubiquity and things should install.

After the install, you will need to reapply the patch in the resulting installed environment, or things like update-grub will die on you!

(huge thanks to cjwatson and ev for giving me some tips while I investigated this)


Syndicated 2011-06-30 01:28:42 from Code happens

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