I just pushed this for Dan McDonald into
illumos:
changeset: 13297:4b9dc4ca8e9f
tag: tip
user: Dan McDonald <danmcd@nexenta.com>
date: Fri Mar 04 13:57:09 2011 -0800
description:
701 UNMAP support for COMSTAR
Reviewed by: Garrett D'Amore <garrett@nexenta.com>
Reviewed by: Eric Schrock <eric.schrock@delphix.com>
Reviewed by: George Wilson <gwilson@zfsmail.com>
Approved by: Garrett D'Amore <garrett@nexenta.com>
This change represents a significant new feature in COMSTAR and ZFS, which will greatly benefit people use SCSI target mode functionality in situations involving over-provisioning. More on that in a minute...
The feature itself was developed by Sumit Gupta for
Nexenta, and is part of our upcoming 3.1 release of
NexentaStor.
Subsequently, Dan took ownership of that code, and working with Eric and George (who are well established ZFS gurus and had significant and useful feedback) improved it still further, and got the code into illumos proper. I believe this represents the first significant ZFS feature to go into the tree since the illumos fork, and also amply demonstrates the collaboration in the illumos community.
I'm looking forward to more collaboration like this in the community.
Now, what does this feature give you? Well, if you're using SCSI Target Mode (either via iSCSI or Fibre Channel or FCoE) to serve up storage to systems running NTFS or ext4, you will be able to make better use of your storage.
Traditionally, when a file was deleted from a filesystem, it was mostly a matter of book-keeping in the meta data in the filesystem. There was nothing to note this in the underlying storage.
With newer SSDs, and with COMSTAR, the ability to get back this notification is incredibly useful. SSDs want it to do garbage collection or other optimizations thereby improving performance.
COMSTAR wants it because now when your thinly-provisioned zvol gets the notification, we can return the storage back to the pool. Prior to this change, the zvol could only grow, it could never shrink. Now, we can give storage back to the pool when you delete a file on the initiator. This is huge in environments running with a lot of VMs using thinly provisioned storage with overallocation.
Anyway, this is now in illumos thanks to Nexenta, and notably, Oracle doesn't have it. Of course, they are welcome to pick up the code for it, but they will need to follow the terms of the CDDL if they choose to do so, the same as everyone else.