[ale] raid suggestions

[Jim Kinney]

On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 10:41 AM, mike at trausch.us <mike at trausch.us> wrote:

> On 02/14/2012 10:38 AM, Jim Kinney wrote:
> > I would be pretty happy with a hardware RAID controller that implemented
> > the kernel's RAID functions with a flashed fpga. That would be an ideal
> > rig to me. :-)
>
> I doubt it would be anywhere as fast.  :-)
>

I disagree.  The performance hit on software raid is in two locations:
write and checksum. Software raid has to issue multiple writes and process
them until completion where hardware raid offloads those interrupts from
the kernel. Checksum issues are the other big cpu hog that can be offloaded
for hardware RAID.

There are GHz speed FPGAs but high MHz is plenty sufficient as the IO is
MHz anyway.

There's been talk for a while of FPGAs becoming more mainstream in
commodity IT. Imagine the fun of a board chipset upgrade with a reflash!
Conversely, imagine the nightmare of security with a trojaned chipset flash.

>
>        --- Mike
>
> --
> A man who reasons deliberately, manages it better after studying Logic
> than he could before, if he is sincere about it and has common sense.
>                                    --- Carveth Read, “Logic”
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
>
>


-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III

As long as the general population is passive, apathetic, diverted to
consumerism or hatred of the vulnerable, then the powerful can do as they
please, and those who survive will be left to contemplate the outcome.
- *2011 Noam Chomsky

http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/
*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.ale.org/pipermail/ale/attachments/20120214/fb7d87f4/attachment-0001.html