[linux-lvm] lvmcache comes back dirty after unclean shutdown
Paul Richards
paul.richards at gmail.com
Fri May 8 08:26:23 UTC 2020
Hello,
I would like to add a warning to the lvmcache man page about its
suitability in environments that expect unclean shutdowns.
I've been using lvmcache on my laptop which has a small nvme drive and
a much larger hdd. I am using approx 60GiB of the nvme drive as a
cache for the 1TiB HDD.
With both "writethrough" and "writeback" modes an unclean shutdown
results in the entire cache being marked as dirty. On next boot the
system then spends a long time (4+ hours) writing the cache out to
disk. From what I can see this is known behavior of lvmcache ([1] and
[2]). It's even documented in the kernel device mapper docs [3].
It seems to me that dm-cache and lvmcache are not appropriate for
environments that expect unclean shutdowns. In those environments I
have found bcache to be a bit more robust.
This is not a criticism of lvmcache and dm-cache. I am sure they
perform well in more robust environments. But I wonder if it would be
appropriate to add a warning note to the lvmcache man page about this
issue?
I am using Ubuntu 20.04 currently, if that's relevant, and I saw the
same issue with 18.04.
1: https://www.redhat.com/archives/dm-devel/2019-July/msg00114.html
2: https://www.redhat.com/archives/dm-devel/2014-December/msg00143.html
3: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blame/79dede78c0573618e3137d3d8cbf78c84e25fabd/Documentation/admin-guide/device-mapper/cache.rst#L140-L143
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