Hi Tejun, On 08/23/2010 11:17 PM +0900, Mike Snitzer wrote: > On Mon, Aug 23 2010 at 8:14am -0400, Tejun Heo <tj@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> On 08/20/2010 10:26 AM, Kiyoshi Ueda wrote: >>> By the way, if these patch-set with the change above are included, >>> even one path failure for REQ_FLUSH on multipath configuration will >>> be reported to upper layer as error, although it's retried using >>> other paths currently. >>> Then, if an upper layer won't take correct recovery action for the error, >>> it would be seen as a regression for users. (e.g. Frequent EXT3-error >>> resulting in read-only mount on multipath configuration.) >>> >>> Although I think the explicit error is fine rather than implicit data >>> corruption, please check upper layers carefully so that users won't see >>> such errors as much as possible. >> >> Argh... then it will have to discern why FLUSH failed. It can retry >> for transport errors but if it got aborted by the device it should >> report upwards. > > Yes, we discussed this issue of needing to train dm-multipath to know if > there was a transport failure or not (at LSF). But I'm not sure when > Hannes intends to repost his work in this area (updated to account for > feedback from LSF). Yes, checking whether it's a transport error in lower layer is the right solution. (Since I know it's not available yet, I just hoped if upper layers had some other options.) Anyway, only reporting errors for REQ_FLUSH to upper layer without such a solution would make dm-multipath almost unusable in real world, although it's better than implicit data loss. >> Maybe just turn off barrier support in mpath for now? If it's possible, it could be a workaround for a short term. But how can you do that? I think it's not enough to just drop REQ_FLUSH flag from q->flush_flags. Underlying devices of a mpath device may have write-back cache and it may be enabled. So if a mpath device doesn't set REQ_FLUSH flag in q->flush_flags, it becomes a device which has write-back cache but doesn't support flush. Then, upper layer can do nothing to ensure cache flush? Thanks, Kiyoshi Ueda -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-ide" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
