Details
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Improvement
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Resolution: Fixed
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Major
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Lustre 2.1.0
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None
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5035
Description
There are a number of ext4 features that we should be enabling by default for newly-formatted ldiskfs filesystems. In particular, the flex_bg option is important for reducing e2fsck time as well as avoiding "slow first write" issues that have hit a number of customers with fuller OSTs. Using flex_bg would avoid 10-minute delay at mount time or for each e2fsck run. As well, it would be useful to also enable other features like huge_file (files > 2TB) and dir_nlink (> 65000 subdirectories) by default.
All of these features are enabled by default if we format the filesystem with the option "-t ext4". Alternately, we could enable these individually in enable_default_backfs_features().
See http://events.linuxfoundation.org/slides/2010/linuxcon_japan/linuxcon_jp2010_fujita.pdf for a summary of improvements. While we won't see the 12h e2fsck -> 5 minute e2fsck improvement shown there (we already use extents and uninit_bg), the flex_bg feature is definitely still a win.
Ihara, thanks for testing. Did you teat on 2.x or 1.8?
As for the problem hit on the MDT, I agree that the mkfs.lustre command should handle this case better. However, I also think that it doesn't make sense to have a 16TB MDT because that much space will never be used. One of the changes being made in this patch is to reduce the default inode ratio to 2048 bytes per inode, which is still very safe but allows more inodes for a given LUN size. I would recommend simply using a smaller LUN for the MDT. With the new inode ratio 8TB is enough for the maximum 4B inodes.