Hello,
for energy saving purposes I try to buffer disk accesses in RAM by making the
mounted (LVM) volume a snapshot and putting the COW device on tmpfs (loop
device over a sparse file) so that I can flush the changes later by making the
volume a snapshot-merge target. Note: I am NOT trying to make a snapshot of
the root volume! (This has obviously been done sucessfully by others.)
This works for a data volume but the system hangs when trying this with the
root volume. The interesting point: The problem seems not to be caused by an
access to the root filesystem.
I have created a chroot environment in a tmpfs volume (and sucessfully done
this with a data volume from there). The relevant part of the script (located
in the chroot environment, of course) is:
dmsetup suspend "$cryptodevice_name" || exit 1
dmsetup load "$cryptodevice_name" --table "0 ${origin_block_count} \
snapshot-merge ${origin_major_minor} ${cow_major_minor} P 8" || exit 1
dmsetup resume "$cryptodevice_name" || exit 1
The hanging occurs during the "dmsetup load". I hat a look at it by strace.
This is what happens with the data volume:
[...]
stat("/dev/mapper/control", {st_mode=S_IFCHR|0600, st_rdev=makedev(10, 236),
...}) = 0
open("/dev/mapper/control", O_RDWR) = 3
open("/proc/devices", O_RDONLY) = 4
fstat(4, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0444, st_size=0, ...}) = 0
mmap(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) =
0x7f855bec6000
read(4, "Character devices:\n 1 mem\n 4 /"..., 1024) = 490
close(4) = 0
munmap(0x7f855bec6000, 4096) = 0
ioctl(3, DM_VERSION, 0x6162a0) = 0
ioctl(3, DM_TABLE_LOAD, 0x6161f0) = 0
close(3) = 0
exit_group(0) = ?
[...]
The same call for the root volume leads to
[...]
ioctl(3, DM_TABLE_LOAD, 0x6161f0) =
(I am not sure about the 0x6161f0)
The exit code never appears. I do not know whether this is a problem of the
ioctl or one of strace. But as the volume has already been suspended at that
time I do not see any reason why strace should be affected. The system is not
completely dead but no useful actitivy is possible any more.
Issuing a suspend and a resume immediately afterwards (without the load) does
not kill the system. So the problem seems to be about the dmsetup load.
This is openSUSE 11.4.
start cmd:> uname -a
Linux inno 2.6.37.6-0.7-desktop #1 SMP PREEMPT 2011-07-21 02:17:24 +0200
x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Best regards,
Hauke
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