RAID56

Status

From 3.19, the recovery and rebuild code was integrated. The one missing piece, from a reliability point of view, is that it is still vulnerable to the parity RAID "write hole", where a partial write as a result of a power failure will result in inconsistent parity data.

• Parity may be inconsistent after a crash (the "write hole")
• Parity data is not checksummed
• No support for discard? (possibly -- needs confirmation with cmason)
• The algorithm uses as many devices as are available: No support for a fixed-width stripe (see note, below)

If you'd like to learn btrfs raid5/6 and rebuilds by example (based on kernel 3.14), you can look at Marc MERLIN's page about btrfs raid 5/6.

Note

Using as many devices as are available means that there will be a performance issue for filesystems with large numbers of devices. It also means that filesystems with different-sized devices will end up with differing-width stripes as the filesystem fills up, and some space may be wasted when the smaller devices are full.

Both of these issues could be addressed by specifying a fixed-width stripe, always running over exactly the same number of devices. This capability is not yet implemented, though.