XFS hangs and freezes with LSI 9265-8i controller on high i/o

[Bernd Schubert]

On 06/15/2012 02:30 PM, Dave Chinner wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 15, 2012 at 01:25:26PM +0200, Bernd Schubert wrote:
>> On 06/15/2012 02:16 AM, Dave Chinner wrote:
>>> Oh, I just noticed you are might be using CFQ (it's the default in
>>> dmesg). Don't - CFQ is highly unsuited for hardware RAID - it's
>>> hueristically tuned to work well on sngle SATA drives. Use deadline,
>>> or preferably for hardware RAID, noop.
>>
>> I'm not sure if noop is really a good recommendation even with hw
>> raid, especially if the the request queue size is high. This week I
>> did some benchmarks with a high rq write size (triggered with
>> sync_file_range(..., SYNC_FILE_RANGE_WRITE) ) and with noop
>> concuring reads then almost entirely got stalled.
>> With deadline read/write balance was much better, although writes
>> still had been preferred (with sync_file_range() and without). I
>> always thought deadline prefers reads and I hope I find some time
>> later on to investigate further what was going on.
>> Test had been on a netapp E5400 hw raid, so rather high end hw raid.
>
> Sounds like a case of the IO scheduler queue and/or CTQ being too
> deep.

Hmm yes probably. With a small request queue and the usage of 
sync_file_range(..., SYNC_FILE_RANGE_WRITE) we only have a small page 
cache buffer. And sync_file_range is required to get perfect IO sizes as 
given by max_sectors_kb.  Without sync_file_range IOs have more or less 
random size, but very rarely aligned to the raid-stripe-size (and yes, 
mkfs.xfs options are correctly set). That is another issue I need to 
find time to investigate.


Cheers,
Bernd