On Mon, Jun 12, 2023 at 1:30 PM Jeff Layton <jlayton@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 2023-06-12 at 11:58 -0400, Jeff Layton wrote:
>
> >
> > Got it: I think I see what's happening. filemap_sample_wb_err just calls
> > errseq_sample, which does this:
> >
> > errseq_t errseq_sample(errseq_t *eseq)
> > {
> > errseq_t old = READ_ONCE(*eseq);
> >
> > /* If nobody has seen this error yet, then we can be the first. */
> > if (!(old & ERRSEQ_SEEN))
> > old = 0;
> > return old;
> > }
> >
> > Because no one has seen that error yet (ERRSEQ_SEEN is clear), the write
> > ends up being the first to see it and it gets back a 0, even though the
> > error happened before the sample.
> >
> > The above behavior is what we want for the sample that we do at open()
> > time, but not what's needed for this use-case. We need a new helper that
> > samples the value regardless of whether it has already been seen:
> >
> > errseq_t errseq_peek(errseq_t *eseq)
> > {
> > return READ_ONCE(*eseq);
> > }
> >
> > ...but we'll also need to fix up errseq_check to handle differences
> > between the SEEN bit.
> >
> > I'll see if I can spin up a patch for that. Stay tuned.
>
> This may not be fixable with the way that NFS is trying to use errseq_t.
>
> The fundamental problem is that we need to mark the errseq_t in the
> mapping as SEEN when we sample it, to ensure that a later error is
> recorded and not ignored.
>
> But...if the error hasn't been reported yet and we mark it SEEN here,
> and then a later error doesn't occur, then a later open won't have its
> errseq_t set to 0, and that unseen error could be lost.
>
> It's a bit of a pity: as originally envisioned, the errseq_t mechanism
> would provide for this sort of use case, but we added this patch not
> long after the original code went in, and it changed those semantics:
>
> b4678df184b3 errseq: Always report a writeback error once
>
> I don't see a good way to do this using the current errseq_t mechanism,
> given these competing needs. I'll keep thinking about it though. Maybe
> we could add some sort of store and forward mechanism for fsync on NFS?
> That could get rather complex though.
Can/should it be marked SEEN when the initial close(2) from tee(1)
reports the error?
Part of the reason I had originally asked about `nfs_file_flush' (i.e.
what close(2) calls) using `file_check_and_advance_wb_err' instead of
`filemap_check_wb_err' was because I was drawn to comparing
`nfs_file_flush' against `nfs_file_fsync' as it seems like in the 3.10
based EL7 kernels, the former used to delegate to the latter (by way
of `vfs_fsync') and so they had consistent behavior, whereas now they
do not.
