Block Data Integrity
(Wed, 11 Jun 2008 16:46:38 +0000)
"These patches allow data integrity information (checksum and more) to be attached to I/Os at the block/filesystem layers and transferred through the entire I/O stack all the way to the physical storage device," began Martin Petersen. He went on to explain, "the integrity metadata can be generated in close proximity to the original data. Capable host adapters, RAID arrays and physical disks can verify the data integrity and abort I/Os in case of a mismatch." He noted that support currently only exists for SCSI disks, but that work is underway to also add support for SATA drives and SCSI tapes, "with a few minor nits due to protocol limitations the proposed SATA format is identical to the SCSI". Explaining how this works, Martin continued:
"SCSI drives can usually be reformatted to 520-byte sectors, yielding 8 extra bytes per sector. These 8 bytes have traditionally been used by RAID controllers to store internal protection information. DIF (Data Integrity Field) is an extension to the SCSI Block Commands that standardizes the format of the 8 extra bytes and defines ways to interact with the contents at the protocol level. [...] When writing, the HBA (Host Bus Adapter) will DMA 512-byte sectors from host memory, generate the matching integrity metadata and send out 520-byte sectors on the wire. The disk will verify the integrity of the data before committing it to stable storage. When reading, the drive will send 520-byte sectors to the HBA. The HBA will verify the data integrity and DMA 512-byte sectors to host memory."