The dm-zoned device mapper target provides transparent write access
to zoned block devices (ZBC and ZAC compliant block devices).
dm-zoned hides to the device user (a file system or an application
doing raw block device accesses) any constraint imposed on write
requests by the device, equivalent to a drive-managed zoned block
device model.
Write requests are processed using a combination of on-disk buffering
using the device conventional zones and direct in-place processing for
requests aligned to a zone sequential write pointer position.
A background reclaim process implemented using dm_kcopyd_copy ensures
that conventional zones are always available for executing unaligned
write requests. The reclaim process overhead is minimized by managing
buffer zones in a least-recently-written order and first targeting the
oldest buffer zones. Doing so, blocks under regular write access (such
as metadata blocks of a file system) remain stored in conventional
zones, resulting in no apparent overhead.
dm-zoned implementation focus on simplicity and on minimizing overhead
(CPU, memory and storage overhead). For a 14TB host-managed disk with
256 MB zones, dm-zoned memory usage per disk instance is at most about
3 MB and as little as 5 zones will be used internally for storing metadata
and performing buffer zone reclaim operations. This is achieved using
zone level indirection rather than a full block indirection system for
managing block movement between zones.
dm-zoned primary target is host-managed zoned block devices but it can
also be used with host-aware device models to mitigate potential
device-side performance degradation due to excessive random writing.
Zoned block devices can be formatted and checked for use with the dm-zoned
target using the dmzadm utility available at:
https://github.com/hgst/dm-zoned-tools
Signed-off-by: Damien Le Moal <damien.lemoal@wdc.com>
Reviewed-by: Hannes Reinecke <hare@suse.com>
Reviewed-by: Bart Van Assche <bart.vanassche@sandisk.com>
[Mike Snitzer partly refactored Damien's original work to cleanup the code]
Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
Damien Le Moal