[linux-lvm] raid & its stripes

[Brassow Jonathan]

> On Sep 15, 2017, at 6:59 AM, lejeczek <peljasz at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> 
> 
> On 15/09/17 03:20, Brassow Jonathan wrote:
>> There is definitely a difference here.  You have 2 stripes with 5 devices in each stripe.  If you were writing sequentially, you’d be bouncing between the first 2 devices until they are full, then the next 2, and so on.
>> 
>> When using the -i argument, you are creating 10 stripes.  Writing sequentially causes the writes to go from one device to the next until all are written and then starts back at the first.  This is a very different pattern.
>> 
>> I think the result of any benchmark on these two very different layouts would be significantly different.
>> 
>>  brassow
>> 
>> BTW, I swear at one point that if you did not provide the ‘-i’ it would use all of the devices as a stripe, such that your two examples would result in the same thing.  I could be wrong though.
>> 
> that's what I thought I remembered too.
> I guess a big question, from user/admin perspective is: are those two stripes LVM decides on(when no -i) is the best possible choice LVM makes after some elaborative determination so the number of stripes(no -i) would, might vary depending on raid type, phy devices number and maybe some other factors or, 2 stripes are simply hard-coded defaults?

If it is a change in behavior, I’m sure it came as the result of some changes in the RAID handling code from recent updates and is not due to some uber-intellegent agent that is trying to figure out the best fit.

 brassow