Failed to make Storage Sahare. RAID6 on btrfs -Pool creates perfectly but Disk Share won't

[phillxnet (Philip Guyton)]

@Superfish1000 Hello again.
Re:

@Superfish1000

I would suggest, if it’s not too much work, is having a check box to acknowledge and enable RAID5/6.

I’m of the opinion that this would be too ‘easy’ for folks to then just tick it without understanding really what they are doing. Hence the upstream move on this being hard line. Also this rather caught us unawares as our main push towards the “Built on openSUSE” was during the 15.0 15.1 15.2 era. Only in 15.3 was this read-only introduced. But there is the one boot re-enable ‘back-door’ of:

echo 1 > /sys/module/btrfs/parameters/allow_unsupported

Thanks to @shocker for looking that one up for us. I just went with the no second-guess option of jumping to a newer kernel all-together to at least also allow such things as raid1c3 raid1c4 vai our new Howto here:

“Installing the Stable Kernel Backport”: Installing the Stable Kernel Backport — Rockstor documentation

Likely the parity raid read-only default will not exist in Leap 15.4 so this is all a temporary arrangement anyway. But still, it was a pain and we have the above options as and when needed.

@Superfish1000

Additionally, I think it would be best to have a re-import check for RAID5/6 as the import process, which I unfortunately am running into again, fails on the latest ISO release.

That is likely unrelated but not necessarily. You could try the above two options depending on if you wish to persist you parity raid pool. Also try disabling quotas first. We also have the following section on importing a read-on or poorly pool:

“Import unwell Pool”: Disks — Rockstor documentation

That may help.

The quota disable may well be all you need, and a manual mount “ro” via the above doc could help with that by allowing a command line qouta disable (via the suggested mount) before then importing as usual. Worth a try. We haven’t had a failed import of healthy drive reported yet that a quota disable didn’t manage to fix.

@Superfish1000

I understand the desire to remove RAID5/6, but apart from my continual propensity to have unclean shutdowns during balances… I haven’t had any issues I can really point to.

We have no plans to remove raid5/6 we have just, for years, indicated them as non production ready as seems to be the consensus. In fact if you are happy to continue with them I would suggest you jump on the new kernel backport bandwagoon via the above howto. That way you remove the default ro of upstream while minimising your risk, sort-of . Worth considering. It also opens up the raid1c4 metadata option also which we need more folks playing with anyway:

https://rockstor.com/docs/howtos/stable_kernel_backport.html#btrfs-raid1c3-raid1c4
for privisos.

Hope that helps and thanks for the feedback. Bit by bit and that ro default did rather sneak up on us I’m afraid. We really done pay it much attention given it’s documented as non-production. Oh well. We do have better end-to-end testing in the works however so that we can notice such things sooner.