Raid1c3 and raid1c4

lucserre · April 11, 2021, 2:31am

Anyone know how to implement raid1c3 (I only see raid1 as an option)?

GeoffA · April 11, 2021, 7:37am

Welcome to Rockstor @lucserre

Unfortunately raid1c3 etc are not yet implemented in the Rockstor GUI. That’s not to say the CLI might not be an option, but I could not say how that would be reflected in the web interface - and its not something i have tried.
I think the 3 and 4 copy versions of btrfs raid1 would be a nice inclusion at some point, but there is so much underway with the tantalisingly close release of v4, and limited resources to do everything, that this may be later rather than sooner.

lucserre · April 11, 2021, 3:15pm

That’s good to know (that eventually it will happen).
Looking forward to v4!

Flox · April 11, 2021, 8:55pm

Hi @lucserre, and welcome to the community!

@GeoffA was right on point so I don’t have much to add to it; I simply wanted to point to a recetn discussion we had on that same topic:

The links in that post provide additional details and answers so I thought these might be of interest to you.

criddle · April 23, 2021, 3:43pm

If you’re just itching to try (I was) you can update your kernel and btrfs-progs on your own following the info in this post: Upgrade Kernel to 4.16
Specifically:

Upgrade Kernel to 4.16

Just another update, it appears that the latest btrfs-progs require a couple more dependencies, so here’s my full steps for successful upgrade to kernel 5.7.2-1.el7.elrepo.x86_64 and btrfs-progs v5.6.1:

yum -y group install "Development Tools"  # Not sure if this is needed, but can't hurt
rpm --import https://www.elrepo.org/RPM-GPG-KEY-elrepo.org  # Import the key for the mainline kernel repo
yum -y install https://www.elrepo.org/elrepo-release-7.el7.elrepo.noarch.rpm  # Install the elrepo repo file
yum -y --enablerepo=elrepo-kernel update  # elrepo-kernel is deactivated by default, enable it and update the system
yum list installed | grep kernel  # You should see multiple kernel versions now

kernelver=$(grubby --default-kernel | sed 's@/boot/vmlinuz-@@')  # The default kernel will now be the latest
sed -i "/SUPPORTED_KERNEL_VERSION/c\SUPPORTED_KERNEL_VERSION = '${kernelver}'" /opt/rockstor/src/rockstor/settings.py  # Update the supported kernel version
grep SUPPORTED /opt/rockstor/src/rockstor/settings.py  # Verify the setting is changed correctly

reboot  # To ensure that the build happens with the new kernel
uname -r  # After reboot to be sure we're running the new kernel

# Install required devel packages for building btrfs-tools
yum -y install asciidoc e2fsprogs-devel libacl-devel libattr-devel libblkid-devel libuuid-devel libzstd-devel lzo-devel python36-devel xmlto zlib-devel
mkdir ~/src; cd ~/src  # Make a new source directory to hold our btrfs-progs source
git clone git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/kdave/btrfs-progs.git  # Grab the latest source, cd into the dir and git pull if you have it already
cd btrfs-progs  # Change to the source dir

./autogen.sh  # Begin the configuration
./configure --prefix=/usr --bindir=/sbin --libdir=/lib  # Configure the build
make  # Compile the source
yum remove btrfs-progs  # Remove the repo version of btrfs-progs to avoid update conflicts
make install  # Install the source
btrfs --version  # Verify
man btrfs  # Double verify

Just DO NOT remove btrfs-progs, it causes issues, just leave it be.

Then you can convert your metadata to raid1c3 - I don’t have the exact command off-hand, but it’s something like:

btrfs balance start -mconvert=raid1c3 /YOUR-MOUNT

I’ve successfully updated to kernel and btrfs-progs 5.11 with this method and have my own raid5 volume metadata at raid1c3

**NOTE: You will not be able to directly import these shares into the Rockstor4 environment until it defaults to a newer kernel and btrfs-progs OR you update on your own manually.

TB-UB · November 14, 2021, 9:06am

Latest download seems to be Rockstor-Leap15.3-generic.x86_64-4.0.9-0.install.iso

Is raid1c3 and/or raid1c4 implemented there ( Rockstor GUI )?

phillxnet · November 14, 2021, 12:58pm

@TB-UB Hello again.

Yes we do now have a new multi arch and machine target downloads on our newly re-done web page here:

https://rockstor.com/dls.html

And as of writing those installers are build from our kiwi-ng config here:

No unfortunately not. Although if you don’t do Web-UI initiated balances or disk manipulations then it may just leave things well-alone and report it’s slightly confused interpretation. But note that these levels are the earliest additions to to btrfs and have had very little field testing even in comparison the the parity raids that are still known to be flaky. But at least they are based on better ‘grounds’ than the partiy 5/6 levels. I think you will also need to use a newer kernel for these levels as I don’t think openSUSE SuSE have back-ported these raid levels to Leap 15.3 or SLES 15 sp3 yet so that may be a warning of sorts also.

Take a looks our new website content here:
Customizable Btrfs NAS Storage Platform
and it’s linked openSUSE doc on installing much newer kernels:
Installing multiple kernel versions | Reference | openSUSE Leap 15.4

So take a look also at @kageurufu excellent recent post on their journey with doing the same, along with btrfs-progs, as they also are using RAID1C4 with our “Built on openSUSE” v4.

But keep in mind such things as are indicated in the following issue we have open on upstream kernel changes. It’s not just additions but also subtractrions/alterations that have to be accounted for when making such core changes to an os:

https://github.com/rockstor/rockstor-core/issues/2311

Hope that helps.