On Wed, Jun 24, 2020 at 5:01 AM Henrique de Moraes Holschuh
[off-list ref] wrote:

On Thu, 18 Jun 2020, Damien Le Moal wrote:

quoted

Are you experiencing data loss or corruption ? If yes, since a clean reboot or
shutdown issues a synchronize cache to all devices, a corruption would mean that
your SSD is probably not correctly processing flush cache commands.

Cache flushes do not matter that much when SSDs and sudden power cuts
are involved.  Power cuts at the wrong time harm the FLASH itself, it is
not about still-in-flight data.

Keep in mind that SSDs do a _lot_ of background writing, and power cuts

What is the __lot__ of SSD's BG writing? GC?

during a FLASH write or erase can cause from weakened cells, to much
larger damage.  It is possible to harden the chip or the design against
this, but it is *expensive*.  And even if warded off by hardening and no
FLASH damage happens, an erase/program cycle must be done on the whole
erase block to clean up the incomplete program cycle.

It should have been SSD's(including FW) responsibility to avoid data loss when
the SSD is doing its own BG writing, because power cut can happen any time
from SSD's viewpoint.

Due to this background activity, an unexpected power cut could damage
data *anywhere* in an SSD: it could hit some filesystem area that was
being scrubbed in background by the SSD, or internal SSD metadata.

So, you want that SSD to know it must be quiescent-for-poweroff for
*real* before you allow the system to do anything that could power it
off.

And, as I have found out the hard way years ago, you also want to give
the SSD enough *extra* time to actually quiesce, even if it claims to be
already prepared for poweroff [1].

When you do not follow these rules, well, excellent datacenter-class
SSDs have super-capacitor power banks that actually work.  Most SSDs do
not, although they hopefully came a long way and hopefully modern SSDs
are not as easily to brick as they were reported to be three or four
years ago.

I remember that DC SSDs often don't support BG GC.


Thanks,
Ming Lei