Hi Neil,
--On 23 March 2007 12:26:31 PM +1100 Neil Brown <neilb@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi,
I have two concerns related to XFS and write barrier support that I'm
hoping can be resolved.
1.
Firstly in xfs_mountfs_check_barriers in fs/xfs/linux-2.6/xfs_super.c,
it tests ....->queue->ordered to see if that is QUEUE_ORDERED_NONE.
If it is, then barriers are disabled.
I think this is a layering violation - xfs really has no business
looking that deeply into the device.
For dm and md devices, ->ordered is never used and so never set, so
xfs will never use barriers on those devices (as the default value is
0 or NONE). It is true that md and dm could set ->ordered to some
non-zero value just to please XFS, but that would be telling a lie and
there is no possible value that is relevant to a layered devices.
I think this test should just be removed and the xfs_barrier_test
should be the main mechanism for seeing if barriers work.
Oh okay.
This is all Christoph's (hch) code, so it would be good for him to comment here.
The external log and readonly tests can stay though.
2.
Secondly, if a barrier write fails due to EOPNOTSUPP, it should be
retried without the barrier (after possibly waiting for dependant
requests to complete). This is what other filesystems do, but I
cannot find the code in xfs which does this.
The approach taken by xfs_barrier_test seems to suggest that xfs does
do this... could someone please point me to the code ?
You got me confused here.
I was wondering why the test write of the superblock (in xfs_barrier_test)
should be retried without barriers :)
But you were referring to the writing of the log buffers using barriers.
Yeah, if we get an EOPNOTSUPP AFAIK, we will report the error and shutdown
the filesystem (xlog_iodone()). This will happen when one of our (up to 8)
incore log buffers I/O completes and xlog_iodone handler is called.
I don't believe we have a notion of barrier'ness changing for us, and
we just test it at mount time.
Which bit of code led you to believe we do a retry?
This is particularly important for md/raid1 as it is quite possible
that barriers will be supported at first, but after a failure and
different device on a different controller could be swapped in that
does not support barriers.
Oh okay, I see. And then later one that supported them can be swapped back in?
So the other FSs are doing a sync'ed write out and then if there is an
EOPNOTSUPP they retry and disable barrier support henceforth?
Yeah, I guess we could do that in xlog_iodone() on failed completion and retry
the write without
the ORDERED flag on EOPNOTSUPP error case (and turn off the flag).
Dave (dgc) can you see a problem with that?
Thanks for your time,
Thanks for pointing it out.
--Tim
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