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Oracle Adds Data-integrity Code To Linux Kernel

Posted by timothy on from the put-your-trust-in-larry dept.

jazir1979 writes "ZDNet is reporting that Oracle has added code to the Linux kernel for ensuring data integrity. The code has been developed in partnership with Emulex and was recently accepted into the 2.6.27 kernel release." According to the article, "The code adds metadata to data at rest or in transit, to monitor whether that data has been corrupted. It helps make sure that I/O operations are valid by looking at that metadata — which acts as verification information — exchanged during data transmissions."

9 of 53 comments (clear)

  1. Dumb question... by geminidomino · · Score: 3, Insightful

    How badly does this affect performance?

    1. Re:Dumb question... by afidel · · Score: 3, Informative

      It doesn't matter much. This patch adds T10-DIF which basically brings minicomputer level data integrity to the commodity computer market. It adds about 1.54% to data storage requirements (8 bytes of ECC per 512 byte block, just like the AS/400) and some small amount of code at the OS and APP layers to check the CRC's. With Oracle I would imagine this might actually INCREASE performance for the most fault intolerant environments since it wouldn't need to do a read after write if the storage system acknowledged a successful T-10 DIF block save.

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  2. Re:Yay for Linux! by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The Year of Linux on the Database? Nah, that happened a long time ago.

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  3. Oracle submitted a 2nd patch by aztektum · · Score: 3, Funny

    It adds a 2nd layer of metadata that is used to verify the first layer of metadata wasn't corrupted so you can be EXTRA confident that your original data was actually handled correctly.

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  4. Terribly old news by zdzichu · · Score: 3, Informative

    Block integrity patches were discussed in excellent article on LWN in July 2008. Kernel 2.6.27 was released in October 2008. This is old news.

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    :wq
    1. Re:Terribly old news by XaXXon · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Oh my god! Not news from October. That was going on two months ago. Everyone knows everything that happened two months ago. What were the editors thinking? Fire them immediately. Let's all go to digg or reddit or myspace where they don't do things like post things that are almost two months old. PANIC PANIC PANIC!!!

      Wow, just let other people read it and go on about your business not caring.

    2. Re:Terribly old news by Nick+Ives · · Score: 4, Informative

      That LWN writeup is far better too though, TFA is terrible. LWN makes it clear that this adds device checksum support, i.e. if your SATA drive supports adding checksum data to blocks this patch will enable that functionality.

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      Nick
  5. Re:Security??? by Workaphobia · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Integrity is a security principle, and that is the sense that they're using the word in the summary. It's pretty much the only definition of the word that makes sense in a computing context. More precisely, we're talking about confidence that the data stored in the system is the same as the data retrieved at a later time. The only difference between this and a more cryptographic sense of the word is that this doesn't attempt to guard against malicious attacks if an adversary had offline access to the disk. (Or so I presume, having not RTFA'd).

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  6. Re:Congratulations... Oracle by scheme · · Score: 3, Informative

    I'm not certain but it appears to be checksumming data while it is moving around the kernel after a write or read call is made.

    Seems like something that should be handled in hardware with ECC, but what do I know.

    Kernel bugs can cause data to get corrupted and hardware ECC won't correct that. Likewise with transfers from memory to disk. Ultimately it'll need to be a hardware/software thing but the software portion is needed as well.

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