On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 01:42:29AM -0700, Matthew Dempsky wrote: > I noticed that softraid's RAID 5 implementation uses the left > asymmetric layout, while I've only found (sparse/vague) documentation > suggesting symmetric layouts should be slightly better (namely, for an > N-disk array, every N consecutive data units will each be stored on a > different disk) without any apparent disadvantage. Is there an > advantage to asymmetric layouts that I'm not aware of?
Designers choice. > > It seems like it would be a fairly non-intrusive change: simply > changing lines 423--424 of softraid_raidp.c to "chunk = (parity + 1 + > chunk) % (no_chunk + 1);", though I haven't tested this. Sure, but why? What are we gaining? > Of course, RAID 5 users would have to recreate their RAID arrays, but > upgrading from 4.7 to 4.8 will require that anyway.
