On Sun, 2016-06-26 at 15:33 -0700, ronnie sahlberg wrote:
> 1, a much more strongly worded warning in the wiki. Make sure there
> are no misunderstandings
> that they really should not use raid56 right now for new filesystems.
I doubt most end users can be assumed to read the wiki...


> 2, Instead of a --force flag. (Users tend to ignore ---force and
> warnings in documentation.)
> Instead ifdef out the options to create raid56 in mkfs.btrfs.
> Developers who want to test can just remove the ifdef and recompile
> the tools anyway.
> But if end-users have to recompile userspace, that really forces the
> point that "you
> really should not use this right now".

Well if one does --force or --yes-i-know-what-i-do, and one actually
doesn't than such person is on his own.
People can always shoot themselves if they want to.

Actually I think that the compile-time way is inferior here.
Distros may just always enable raid56 there to allow people to continue
mounting their existing filesystems.



What should IMHO be done as well is giving a big fat warning in the
manpages/etc. that when nodatacow is used RAID recovery cannot produce
valid data (at least as long as there isn't checksumming implemented
for nodatacow).
Probably it should also be documented what btrfs does in such
situation. E.g. does it just randomly pick a readable block from one of
the copies? Simply error out and consider the file broken? Fill the
blocks in question with zero?

Cheers,
Chris.