Re: Block-level CRC checks

Paul Schlie wrote:
>
> ... if that doesn't fix
> the problem, assume a single bit error, and iteratively flip
> single bits until the check sum matches ...
This can actually be done much faster, if you're doing a CRC checksum 
(aka modulo over GF(2^n)). Basically, an error flipping bit n will 
always create the same xor between the computed CRC and the stored CRC. 
So you can just store a table- for all n, an error in bit n will create 
an xor of this value, sort the table in order of xor values, and then 
you can do a binary search on the table, and get exactly what bit was wrong.

This is actually probably fairly safe- for an 8K page, there are only 
65536 possible bit positions. Assuming a 32-bit CRC, that means that 
larger corrupts are much more likely to hit one of the other 
4,294,901,760 (2^32 - 2^16) CRC values- 99.998% likely, in fact.

Brian



> (hopefully not making the
> problem worse as may be the case if many bits were actually already
> in error) and write the data back, and proceed as normal, possibly
> logging the action; otherwise presume the data is unrecoverable and
> in error, somehow mark it as being so such that subsequent queries
> which may utilize any portion of it knows it may be corrupt (which
> I suspect may be best done not on file-system blocks, but actually
> on a logical rows or even individual entries if very large, as my
> best initial guess, and likely to measurably affect performance
> when enabled, and haven't a clue how resulting query should/could
> be identified as being potentially corrupt without confusing the
> client which requested it).
>
>
>
>