On 9/20/05, Theodore Ts'o <tytso@xxxxxxx> wrote:
There is a very interesting paper that I coincidentally just came
across today that talks about making filesystems robust against
various different forms of failures of modern disk systems. It is
going to be presented at the upcoming 2005 SOSP conference.
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/adsl/Publications/iron-sosp05.pdf
Very interesting indeed, although it almost seems silly to tackle the
difficult problem of making filesystems highly robust against oddball
failure modes while our RAID subsystem falls horribly on it's face in
the fairly common (and conceptually easy to handle) failure mode of a
raid-5 where two disks have single unreadable blocks on differing
parts of the disk. (the current raid system hits one bad block, fails
the whole disk, then you attempt a rebuild and while reading hits the
other bad block and downs the array).