raid6: warn when using less than four devices

Quoting H.  Peter Anvin who came up with the RAID6 P/Q algorithm, and who
wrote the initial implementation, then still part of the md driver:

  The RAID-6 code has *never* supported only 3 units, and if it ever
  worked for *any* of the implementations it was purely by accident.
  Speaking as the original author I should know; this was deliberate as
  in some cases the degenerate case (3) would have required extra trays
  in the code to no user benefit.

While md never allowed less than 4 devices, btrfs does.  This new warning
will trigger for such file systems, but given how it already causes havoc
that is a good thing.  If btrfs wants to fix third, it should switch to
transparently use three-way mirroring underneath, which will work as P and
Q are copies of the single data device by the definition of the Linux RAID
6 P/Q algorithm.

Link: https://lore.kernel.org/20260518051804.462141-9-hch@lst.de
Signed-off-by: Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>
Acked-by: Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@kernel.org>
Tested-by: Ard Biesheuvel <ardb@kernel.org> # kunit only on arm64
Cc: Albert Ou <aou@eecs.berkeley.edu>
Cc: Alexander Gordeev <agordeev@linux.ibm.com>
Cc: Alexandre Ghiti <alex@ghiti.fr>
Cc: Arnd Bergmann <arnd@arndb.de>
Cc: "Borislav Petkov (AMD)" <bp@alien8.de>
Cc: Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
Cc: Chris Mason <clm@fb.com>
Cc: Christian Borntraeger <borntraeger@linux.ibm.com>
Cc: Dan Williams <dan.j.williams@intel.com>
Cc: David Sterba <dsterba@suse.com>
Cc: Heiko Carstens <hca@linux.ibm.com>
Cc: Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
Cc: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@zytor.com>
Cc: Huacai Chen <chenhuacai@kernel.org>
Cc: Ingo Molnar <mingo@redhat.com>
Cc: Li Nan <linan122@huawei.com>
Cc: Madhavan Srinivasan <maddy@linux.ibm.com>
Cc: Michael Ellerman <mpe@ellerman.id.au>
Cc: Nicholas Piggin <npiggin@gmail.com>
Cc: Palmer Dabbelt <palmer@dabbelt.com>
Cc: Song Liu <song@kernel.org>
Cc: Sven Schnelle <svens@linux.ibm.com>
Cc: Vasily Gorbik <gor@linux.ibm.com>
Cc: WANG Xuerui <kernel@xen0n.name>
Cc: Will Deacon <will@kernel.org>
Signed-off-by: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>

1 files changed, 2 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/include/linux/raid/pq.h b/include/linux/raid/pq.h
index 425a227591c0..87e3cb55bf07 100644
--- a/include/linux/raid/pq.h
+++ b/include/linux/raid/pq.h
@@ -11,6 +11,8 @@
 #include <linux/blkdev.h>
 #include <linux/mm.h>
 
+#define RAID6_MIN_DISKS		4
+
 void raid6_gen_syndrome(int disks, size_t bytes, void **ptrs);
 void raid6_xor_syndrome(int disks, int start, int stop, size_t bytes,
 		void **ptrs);