ZFS works best when it is notified as soon as possible when a device
failure occurs. This allows it to immediately start any recovery
actions which may be needed. In theory Linux supports a flag which
can be set on bio's called FAILFAST which provides this quick
notification by disabling the retry logic in the lower scsi layers.
That's the theory at least. In practice is turns out that while the
flag exists you oddly have to set it with the BIO_RW_AHEAD flag.
And even when it's set it you may get retries in the low level
drivers decides that's the right behavior, or if you don't get the
right error codes reported to the scsi midlayer.
Unfortunately, without additional kernels patchs there's not much
which can be done to improve this. Basically, this just means that
it may take 2-3 minutes before a ZFS is notified properly that a
device has failed. This can be improved and I suspect I'll be
submitting patches upstream to handle this.
By default the zpool_layout command would always use the slot
number assigned by Linux when generating the zdev.conf file.
This is a reasonable default there are cases when it makes
sense to remap the slot id assigned by Linux using your own
custom mapping.
This commit adds support to zpool_layout to provide a custom
slot mapping file. The file contains in the first column the
Linux slot it and in the second column the custom slot mapping.
By passing this map file with '-m map' to zpool_config the
mapping will be applied when generating zdev.conf.
Additionally, two sample mapping have been added which reflect
different ways to map the slots in the dragon drawers.
Brian Behlendorf