Post Syndicated from jzb original https://lwn.net/Articles/1107473/

Christoph Hellwig has announced the
initial public release of XRAID—declustered parity RAID that is integrated
into XFS.

The two primary aims of XRAID are to support parity RAID on zoned devices
like SMR hard drives, and to provide a fast RAID implementation without
inherent data integrity problems. XRAID, just like zoned XFS also works
on conventional hard drives and SSDs. Optimizing for SSD performance has
not been a focus, but even without that, writes are up to 20 times faster
than mdraid. […]

Work on XRAID has been ongoing for a year and a half, and while we aren’t
anywhere near ready for an upstream submission, we are interested in
feedback and testing from a wider audience now. The current
implementation supports zero to 2 parities. We did experiments with the
SnapRAID parity library to support 3 and more parities, and while that
is not included in the current version, support for more parities is
planned and the code is prepared for it.

The xfsprogs branch includes mkfs support and a new “xraid” utility for
managing devices and inspecting an XRAID file-systems. We have also
extended Zonar (The zoned file-system visualisation tool) to show how
each logical zone maps onto physical zones on devices.

Hellwig gave a presentation at
FOSSY in August on this topic; video of the talk does not seem to be available
yet, but his slides are
available.