Re: Software RAID1 with atacontrol

On Mon, Sep 27, 2004 at 11:46:03AM +0200, Thomas Pornin wrote:
+> I then tried to simulate a crash by unplugging one disk (with the
+> machine swtiched off). On reboot, the mirror could still be accessed
+> under the name ar0s1d, and atacontrol reported one disk as READY and
+> the other as DOWN. This is fine. I thus made some write accesses on the
+> filesystem, switched off the machine, plugged back the missing disk and
+> rebooted. There, things have gone amiss: the code did not detect that
+> both disks were not synchronized, and happily mounted the filesystem.
+> Bad errors then happend upon reading the disk ("ls" reporting "invalid
+> file descriptor", and so on). I detached one disk (with "atacontrol
+> detach") and attached it again, and then added it with "addspare"; then
+> I rebuilt the array ("atacontrol rebuild") and all was fine again.
+> 
+> I then did a second test: I launched a process which wrote on the
+> mirror filesystem ("dd if=/dev/random of=foo") and, which the system
+> was writing on the disk, I hit the reset switch (thus simulating a
+> power failure). Since the two disk writes cannot be guaranteed as
+> simultaneous, the two disks cannot be synchronized. But, upon reboot,
+> the system considered both disks to be READY.
+> 
+> 
+> Therefore I think that there is something fishy here. Since the same
+> code is used for Promise RAID cards, the support for those card may be
+> "broken" as well (at least unreliable in case of a crash, which is a
+> problem since RAID1 is meant to add reliability in case of a crash).
+> What can I do to help debug this ?

I can only suggest gmirror(8):)

+> As a side note: I get the same read and write throughput on the mirror
+> (about 20 MB/s for reading or writing -- this is what each disk can do
+> alone). I expected a doubled throughput for reading (the disks are on
+> two distinct ATA controllers). Maybe this is a symptom of something
+> wrong elsewhere ?

Random reads? Yes. Sequential read? No, because it isn't seqential from
disk point of view. Compare how data are read from mirror and stripe.

-- 
Pawel Jakub Dawidek                       http://www.FreeBSD.org
pjd_at_FreeBSD.org                           http://garage.freebsd.pl
FreeBSD committer                         Am I Evil? Yes, I Am!