Re: Could drbd randomly flip bits? Was: Database page corruption on disk occurring during mysqldump on a fresh database and Was: Spontaneous development of supremely large files on different ext3 filesystems

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

 



Hi Maurice,

If you're running into corruption both in ext3 metadata and in MySQL data, it is certainly not he fault of MySQL as you're likely aware.

I am hoping they are not related. The problems with MySQL surfaced almost immediately after upgrading to 5.0.x.

It's possible that they are not related, but it could even be 5.0 specific but still not a MySQL bug. I.e. MySQL 5.0 could be doing something that steps on the bug and causes it to occur. But, it's hard to say anything for sure. Nonetheless, I generally don't bother worrying about the possibility of MySQL bugs until I'm sure that the OS and hardware are stable.

You can see that there are in fact many bits flipped in each. I would suspect higher-level corruption than

I initially thought this as well, but the explanation on the ext3 mailing list is that it really is just a lone flipped bit in both instances. The other differences are due to fsck padding out the block when it guesses what the correct size is.

Interesting. Can you forward that mail to me personally, or summarize for the list? I'd be interested to read the explanation.

Do note that data on e.g. the PCI bus is not protected by any sort of checksum. I've seen this cause corruption problems with PCI risers and RAID cards. Are you using a PCI riser card? Note that LSI does *not* certify their cards to be used on risers if you are custom building a machine.

Yes, there is a riser card. Wouldn't this imply that LSI is saying you can't use a 1U or a 2U box?

Kind of. Presumably you would be buying a vendor integrated solution where they have certified that the riser card and RAID card are compatible. Presumably. You'll also notice that most vendors are moving to controllers that aren't PCI{,-E,-X} slot based, and rather connect directly to a low-profile integrated slot. This removes a few variables. (And frees up some space.)

It's kind of scary there is no end-to-end parity implemented somewhere along the whole data path to prevent this. It sort of defeats the point of RAID 6 and ECC.

I agree, it's pretty damn scary. You can read about the story and the ensuing discussion here:

http://jcole.us/blog/archives/2006/09/04/on-1u-cases-pci-risers-and-lsi-megaraid/

How did you determine this was the cause?

Isolating lots of variables. The customer in question had a workload that could reproduce the problem reliably, although not in the same place or same time to be able to track things down, and not under debug mode (which likely slowed things down enough to not cause trouble).

I finally suggested that they isolate the riser card as a variable by plugging it directly into the slot. Since it was a 1U machine, it required taking the metal frame off the card and leaving the case open (and hanging out into the datacenter aisle). it could then be shown that with riser, corruption always occurred, and without the riser, corruption never occurred.

Obviously, running the machines with cases open and cards plugged in directly was not an option, so the only other possible option was chosen: move to all new hardware with integrated RAID. (HP and their integrated SmartArray/cciss controller was chosen as a vendor in this case.)

Do you mean a Serially-Attached SCSI aka SAS controller, I assume?

No, it's SATA to SCSI.

Interesting. I hadn't heard of such a thing until I just looked it up. But in any case that adds yet another variable (and a fairly uncommon one) to the mix.

Regards,

Jeremy

--
high performance mysql consulting
www.provenscaling.com

_______________________________________________
Ext3-users mailing list
Ext3-users@xxxxxxxxxx
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ext3-users

[Index of Archives]         [Linux RAID]     [Kernel Development]     [Red Hat Install]     [Video 4 Linux]     [Postgresql]     [Fedora]     [Gimp]     [Yosemite News]

  Powered by Linux