Re: [RFC PATCH 0/5] Btrfs: Add hot data tracking functionality

From: Christian Stroetmann
Date: Tue Jul 27 2010 - 19:34:46 EST


At the 28.07.2010 00:00, Ben Chociej wrote:
INTRODUCTION:

This patch series adds experimental support for tracking data
temperature in Btrfs. Essentially, this means maintaining some key
stats (like number of reads/writes, last read/write time, frequency of
reads/writes), then distilling those numbers down to a single
"temperature" value that reflects what data is "hot."

The long-term goal of these patches, as discussed in the Motivation
section at the end of this message, is to enable Btrfs to perform
automagic relocation of hot data to fast media like SSD. This goal has
been motivated by the Project Ideas page on the Btrfs wiki.

Of course, users are warned not to run this code outside of development
environments. These patches are EXPERIMENTAL, and as such they might
eat your data and/or memory.


MOTIVATION:

The overall goal of enabling hot data relocation to SSD has been
motivated by the Project Ideas page on the Btrfs wiki at
https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Project_ideas. It is hoped that
this initial patchset will eventually mature into a usable hybrid
storage feature set for Btrfs.

This is essentially the traditional cache argument: SSD is fast and
expensive; HDD is cheap but slow. ZFS, for example, can already take
advantage of SSD caching. Btrfs should also be able to take advantage
of hybrid storage without any broad, sweeping changes to existing code.

Wouldn't this feature be useful for other file systems as well, so that a more general and not an only Btrfs related solution is preferable?

With Btrfs's COW approach, an external cache (where data is *moved* to
SSD, rather than just cached there) makes a lot of sense. Though these
patches don't enable any relocation yet, they do lay an essential
foundation for enabling that functionality in the near future. We plan
to roll out an additional patchset introducing some of the automatic
migration functionality in the next few weeks.


With all the best
Christian Stroetmann
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