christophe varoqui wrote:
On mer, 2005-04-06 at 09:02 -0700, Mike Christie wrote:
Christophe Varoqui wrote:
On Tue, Apr 05, 2005 at 10:32:23PM +0100, Alasdair G Kergon wrote:
I appear to have almost succeeded in squeezing 0.4.4-pre8 into
RHEL4 U1, but I doubt I'll be allowed any more updates now except
for severe bugs.
Just to let you you know what I think is still needed before 0.4.4 :
o memory allocation error paths audit (mostly done in pre9)
The pathcheckers use sgio, right? The block layer sg io code does some
allocations with GFP_KERNEL (bio_copy_user and bio_map_user for
example), so if you are relying on that path for failback I think you
will be in trouble.
Indeed.
Do you have suggestions to work around this issue ?
For the bio allocation couldn't they just be made to do atomic
allocations or ones that wait but do not cause IO (__GFP_WAIT/GFP_NOIO?)?
The other allocations could be made to not use GFP_KERNEL too, but they
of course do not have mempools like the bios so there would still be
that problem. At least we are not going to block on a write to the same
disk we are trying to failback though.
Instead, what if the daemon that drives the path testing stays in the
kernel, but the component that sends the command was in a dm-multipath
module? We would never need more than one command per queue for testing
outstanding, so if there was a path testing handler in the kernel the
daemon would instruct that handler to send off its command. The testing
handler would just have a command and other resources preallocated or
use the kernel's preallocated resources, like using blk_get_request
which uses the queue's mempool, when it could. And then it would just
insert the command like the hw_handlers do - the preallocation is like
the hw_handlers too. Maybe at that point though people would just
consider putting the whole thing in the kernel since my idea seems like
a hack to bypass the sg io paths instead of fixing them (or maybe the sg
io paths were not supposed to be used for failback and failover?).
For iscsi I had begun to make a tester that just writes to a transport
class sysfs file (another allocation :) I know, but it does not have to
be sysfs - it is just what everyone happened to be using at the time),
which in turn instructs the driver to send a iscsi ping. This is similar
to above.
Regards,
