Chandra Seetharaman wrote:
On Mon, 2009-10-05 at 15:01 +0200, Hannes Reinecke wrote:
Thanks for the comment and the patch. I will try the patch.
Hmm. IIRC we added the synchronous mode by request of LSI/IBM, as the RDAC
handler could only support on MODE SELECT command at a time.
If LSI checked this, okay, no objections.
The original patch (for rdac) came from LSI (Moger Babu), I made changes
to the infrastructure and to the code to fit them together.
However: The main reason why we're getting flooded with MODE SELECT commands
is that the RDAC handler switches _each LUN_, not the entire controller.
Seeing that the controller simply cannot cope with the resulting MODE SELECT
flood wouldn't it be more sensible to switch the entire controller here?
I see your point of view.... but here is the rationale...
When we originally added the rdac support (as dm_rdac), we decided this
way consciously for the following reasons:
1. we do not know which link is broken (hba-ctlr or ctlr-lun).
The way it is currently implemented, both these cases are handled.
Quite. But if the ctlr-lun link is broken, we really should receive
and appropriate error code, which then could be handled in dm-rdac
appropriately. After all, the controller is still accessible and
so we don't have to guess what happened (which is all what multipath
is about). So I doubt we need to worry about this.
2. multipath layer to decide what to do and this module to just do
what it was told.
Yep.
3. since multipath sends pg_init only if there is any IO sent to the
lun, (with the current implementation) we don't have to change
ownership (back and forth) of all the luns if the user is using only
a handful.
Well, yes. But if the implementation is such that changing ownership
for all LUNs is about as efficient as changing an individual LUN (or,
as the case might be, as _inefficient_ :-), surely it's better to
save us some coding here.
4. to be consistent with LSI's original driver (which does one lun at a
time).
:-/ That's unfair.
But it still has the drawback that it doesn't scale; given enough LUNs and
access patterns you _inevitably_ have to send MODE SELECT commands for
each LUN, ie you only delay this issue.
Only by switching all LUNs you can avoid this.
Cheers,
Hannes
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Dr. Hannes Reinecke zSeries & Storage
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SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstr. 5, 90409 Nürnberg
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