Hello Tom, thanks, for your reply. On Mon, 2009-03-09 at 00:10 -0500, Tom Zanussi wrote: > On Thu, 2009-03-05 at 17:23 +0100, Martin Peschke wrote: > > It's definitely good to see hexdumps, but it's hard to tell from a > single one - the best way to make progress would be to provide enough > information for anyone to be able to reproduce it on more common > hardware ie. x86/x86_64. I run some internal I/O workload generator against an FCP disk with 4 paths. My blktrace command line: blktrace -a issue -a complete -o - /dev/sda /dev/sdu /dev/sdao /dev/sdbi | blkiomon -I 100 -b blkiomon.out > Does it only happen only on systemZ as far as > you know (I haven't seen it on x86_64)? Don't know yet. I am trying to reproduce the issue on my laptop... but it's not quite the same setup. > Do you get dropped events every > time it happens (which would indicate a buffer-full related condition) > or never? no dropped events > Does it only happen in pipeline mode or normal to-disk > logging? both > Are you using the default sub-buffer sizes or something else? defaults > Only logging certain event types? issue/dispatch and complete > Is it a recent regression, since it > doesn't seem to have been a problem before, etc.? no recent regression - I saw it last summer too > It may be the relay read producing these effects, but it may also be the > blktrace userspace buffering of that read data that has a bug. I am quite sure it is a kernel issue. I have patched relay in order to "poison" relay buffers - 0x55 for re-used buffers, 0x66 for padding, 0x77 for consumed buffers: --- kernel/relay.c | 5 +++++ 1 file changed, 5 insertions(+) --- a/kernel/relay.c +++ b/kernel/relay.c @@ -735,6 +735,8 @@ size_t relay_switch_subbuf(struct rchan_ old_subbuf = buf->subbufs_produced % buf->chan->n_subbufs; buf->padding[old_subbuf] = buf->prev_padding; buf->subbufs_produced++; + memset((char *)buf->data + buf->offset, 0x66, + buf->prev_padding); if (buf->dentry) buf->dentry->d_inode->i_size += buf->chan->subbuf_size - @@ -767,6 +769,8 @@ size_t relay_switch_subbuf(struct rchan_ if (unlikely(length + buf->offset > buf->chan->subbuf_size)) goto toobig; + memset(buf->data, 0x55, buf->chan->subbuf_size); + return length; toobig: @@ -1112,6 +1116,7 @@ static int subbuf_read_actor(size_t read desc->error = -EFAULT; ret = 0; } + memset(from, 0x77, ret); desc->arg.data += ret; desc->written += ret; desc->count -= ret; This is what I get in user space then: --- suspiscous pdu_len --- magic 0x65617407 sequence 0x00003baf time 0x5555555555555555 sector 0x5555555555555555 bytes 0x55555555 action 0x55555555 pid 0x55555555 device 0x55555555 cpu 0x55555555 error 0x5555 pdu_len 0x5555 65617407 00003baf 55555555 55555555 55555555 55555555 55555555 55555555 55555555 55555555 55555555 55555555 > Also I > see that the bad trace is one that has a large pdu payload, which is cut > off in the second trace, which could point to erroneous pdu handling in > blktrace userspace. Don't worry about the bad trace. It's junk anyway, because a broken pdu_len of the previous trace made blktrace look for the next trace at a wrong offset. Martin -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-s390" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html