Hello Jason, Wednesday, December 20, 2006, 1:02:36 AM, you wrote:
JJWW> Hi Robert JJWW> I didn't take any offense. :-) I completely agree with you that zpool JJWW> striping leverages standard RAID-0 knowledge in that if a device JJWW> disappears your RAID group goes poof. That doesn't really require a JJWW> notice...was just trying to be complete. :-) JJWW> The surprise to me was that detecting block corruption did the same JJWW> thing...since most hardware RAID controllers and filesystems do a poor JJWW> job of detecting block-level corruption, kernel panicking on corrupt JJWW> blocks seems to be what folks like me aren't expecting until it JJWW> happens. JJWW> Frankly, in about 5 years when ZFS and its concepts are common JJWW> knowledge, warning folks about corrupt blocks re-booting your server JJWW> would be like notifying them what rm and mv do. However, until then JJWW> warning them that corruption will cause a panic would definitely aid JJWW> folks who think they understand because they have existing RAID and JJWW> SAN knowledge, and then get bitten. Also, I think the zfsassist JJWW> program is a great idea for newbies. I'm not sure how often it would JJWW> be used by storage pros new to ZFS. Using the gal with the EMC DMX-3 JJWW> again as an example (sorry! O:-) ), I'm sure she's pretty experienced JJWW> and had no problems using ZFS correctly...just was not expecting a JJWW> kernel panic on corruption and so was taken by surprise as to what JJWW> caused the kernel panic when it happened. A warning message when JJWW> creating a striped pool, would in my case have stuck in my brain so JJWW> that when the kernel panic happened, corruption of the zpool would JJWW> have been on my top 10 things to expect as a cause. Anyway, this is JJWW> probably an Emacs/VI argument to some degree. Now that I've JJWW> experienced a panic from zpool corruption its on the forefront of my JJWW> mind when designing ZFS zpools, and the warning wouldn't do much for JJWW> me now. Though I probably would have preferred to learn from a warning JJWW> message instead of a panic. :-) But with other file systems you basically get the same - in many cases kernel crash - but in a more unpredictable way. Now not that I'm fond of current ZFS behavior, I would really like to specify like in UFS if system has to panic or just lock the filesystem (or a pool). As Eric posted some time ago (I think it was Eric) it's on a list to address. However I still agree that striped pools should be displayed (zpool status) with stripe keyword like mirrors or raidz groups - that would be less confusing for beginners. -- Best regards, Robert mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://milek.blogspot.com _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
