Failing XFS filesystem underlying Ceph OSDs

[Alex Gorbachev]

Hi Dave,

On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 8:35 PM, Dave Chinner <david at fromorbit.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 06, 2015 at 03:20:19PM -0400, Alex Gorbachev wrote:
> > On Sun, Jul 5, 2015 at 7:24 PM, Dave Chinner <david at fromorbit.com>
> wrote:
> > > On Sun, Jul 05, 2015 at 12:25:47AM -0400, Alex Gorbachev wrote:
> > > > > > sysctl vm.swappiness=20 (can probably be 1 as per article)
> > > > > >
> > > > > > sysctl vm.min_free_kbytes=262144
> > > > >
> > > [...]
> > > >
> > > > We have experienced the problem in various guises with kernels 3.14,
> > > 3.19,
> > > > 4.1-rc2 and now 4.1, so it's not new to us, just different error
> stack.
> > > > Below are some other stack dumps of what manifested as the same
> error.
> > > >
> > > >  [<ffffffff817cf4b9>] schedule+0x29/0x70
> > > >  [<ffffffffc07caee7>] _xfs_log_force+0x187/0x280 [xfs]
> > > >  [<ffffffff810a4150>] ? try_to_wake_up+0x2a0/0x2a0
> > > >  [<ffffffffc07cb019>] xfs_log_force+0x39/0xc0 [xfs]
> > > >  [<ffffffffc07d6542>] xfsaild_push+0x552/0x5a0 [xfs]
> > > >  [<ffffffff817d2264>] ? schedule_timeout+0x124/0x210
> > > >  [<ffffffffc07d662f>] xfsaild+0x9f/0x140 [xfs]
> > > >  [<ffffffffc07d6590>] ? xfsaild_push+0x5a0/0x5a0 [xfs]
> > > >  [<ffffffff81095e29>] kthread+0xc9/0xe0
> > > >  [<ffffffff81095d60>] ? flush_kthread_worker+0x90/0x90
> > > >  [<ffffffff817d3718>] ret_from_fork+0x58/0x90
> > > >  [<ffffffff81095d60>] ? flush_kthread_worker+0x90/0x90
> > > >  INFO: task xfsaild/sdg1:2606 blocked for more than 120 seconds.
> > > >        Not tainted 3.19.4-031904-generic #201504131440
> > > >  "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this
> > > message.
> > >
> > > That's indicative of IO completion problems, but not a crash.
> > >
> > > >  BUG: unable to handle kernel NULL pointer dereference at
> > >  (null)
> > > >  IP: [<ffffffffc04be80f>] xfs_count_page_state+0x3f/0x70 [xfs]
> > > ....
> > > >   [<ffffffffc04be880>] xfs_vm_releasepage+0x40/0x120 [xfs]
> > > >   [<ffffffff8118a7d2>] try_to_release_page+0x32/0x50
> > > >   [<ffffffff8119fe6d>] shrink_page_list+0x69d/0x720
> > > >   [<ffffffff811a058d>] shrink_inactive_list+0x1dd/0x5d0
> > > ....
> > >
> > > Again, this is indicative of a page cache issue: a page without
> > > buffers has been passed to xfs_vm_releasepage(), which implies the
> > > page flags are not correct. i.e PAGE_FLAGS_PRIVATE is set but
> > > page->private is null...
> > >
> > > Again, this is unlikely to be an XFS issue.
> > >
> >
> > Sorry for my ignorance, but would this likely come from Ceph code or a
> > hardware issue of some kind, such as a disk drive?  I have reached out to
> > RedHat and Ceph community on that as well.
>
> More likely a kernel bug somewhere in the page cache or memory
> reclaim paths. The issue is that we only notice the problem long
> after it has occurred. i.e. when XFS goes to tear down the page it has
> been handed, the page is already in a bad state and so it doesn't
> really tell us anything about the cause of the problem.
>
> Realisticaly, we need a script that reproduces the problem (that
> doesn't require a Ceph cluster) to be able to isolate the cause.
> In the mean time, you can always try running  CONFIG_XFS_WARN=y to
> see if that catches problems earlier, and you might also want to do
> things like turn on memory poisoning and other kernel debugging
> options to try to isolate the cause of the issue....
>

We have been error free for almost 3 weeks now with these changes:

vm.swappiness=1
vm.min_free_kbytes=262144

I wonder if this is related to us using high speed Areca HBAs with RAM
writeback cache and having had vm.swappiness=0 previously.  POssibly the
HBA handing down a large chunk of IO very fast and page cache not being to
handle it with swappiness=0.  I will keep monitoring, but thank you very
much for the analysis and info.

Alex



>
> Cheers,
>
> Dave.
> --
> Dave Chinner
> david at fromorbit.com
>
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