Details
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New Feature
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Resolution: Fixed
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Minor
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None
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9223372036854775807
Description
Data integrity(T10PI) support for hard disk is common now which raises the need for adding the support into Lustre. This is not the first attempt to implement T10PI support for Lustre, but the former work has been stopped for years (LU-2584). Instead of implementing end-to-end data integrity in one shot, we are trying to implement data integrity step by step. Because of this difference, we feel it would be better to create a different ticket.
The first step would be adding support for pretecting data integrity from Lustre OSD to disk, i.e. OSD-to-Storage T10PI.
Given the fact that checksum are already supported for Lustre RPCs, the data are already protected when transfering through the network. By using both network checksum and OSD-to-Storage T10PI together, the time window with no data protection will be decreased a lot. The only danger would be the page cache in memory on OSD are changed somehow between RPC checksum check and OSD T10PI checksum calculation. It would be a doubt whether it is really necessary to implement end-to-end T10PI support. However, convincing the concerned users to accept this small probability is still difficult, especially when we do not have a quantitative estimation of the probability.
But, even Lustre supports OSC-to-storage T10PI feature, the data are not fully protected in theory, unless some kind of APIs of T10PI are provided for applications, e.g. https://lwn.net/Articles/592113. Suporting that kind of APIs would be even more difficult, because stripe of LOV needs to be taken care of, or unless we limit the end-to-end T10PI to one-stripe files.
One major difficulty of implementing OSC-to-storage T10PI feature for Lustre is, a single bulk RPC can be splitted into server I/Os on disk, which means, the checkum is needed to be re-calculated again.
In order to avoid this problem, Lustre client need to start smaller bulk RPC so as to make sure the RPC can always be written/readed in one I/O. This will eliminate the need to recalculate the T10PI protection data on OSD side.
