Re: i/o scheduler deadlocks with loopback devices

[Nathan Gamber <ngamber@liquidweb.com>]

  Oddly enough, this only occurs on Intel hardware (core i5s, xeon 
boxen) and not Opteron/Phenom systems.

On 10/19/10 13:52, Nathan Gamber wrote:
>  Hello all,
>
> I'm able to consistently reproduce lockups in my domU with heavy I/O 
> with the following error:
>
> 36841.420662] INFO: task rsyslogd:15014
> blocked for more than 120 seconds. [36841.420843] "echo 0>
> /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message.
>
> The task varies between any of the tasks that might be active 
> (kjournald, loop0, etc.)
>
> My setup is:
> Xen dom0  version 3.4.2.
> domU: Ubuntu 10.04, 2.6.36-rc6 based on Stefano Stabellini's 
> v2.6.36-rc6-urgent-fixes tree.
> Paravirtual disks and network interfaces.
> Root filesystem on /dev/xvda3, formatted ext3, mounted with default 
> options.
> Both dom0 and domU are using the CFQ i/o scheduler.
>
> The xvbd is based on LVM, on top of a local SATA RAID array.
>
>
> To produce this, I can do one of the following:
>
> Set up domU as a primary drbd node, with my drbd volume on top of a 
> local loopback device, and then rsync many files to the volume, delete 
> them, and repeat until the crash.
>
> Mount a linux iso via loopback on a /mnt/test, rsync /mnt/test/ to 
> another directory on xvda3, delete the files, and then repeat until 
> the crash.
>
> This is very similar to the following situation:
>
> http://www.amailbox.org/mailarchive/linux-kernel/2010/9/1/4614107
>
> Jeremy Fitzhardinge replied to that thread, indicating that his "xen: 
> use percpu interrupts for IPIs and VIRQs" and "xen: handle events as 
> edge-triggered" patches should fix the issue. These were introduced 
> into 2.6.36-rc3, I believe, and the issue persists. Disabling 
> irqbalanced in dom0, as he suggested as a workaround, has no effect. 
> I've also tried changing the scheduler, and reducing the number of 
> vcpus from 4 to 1, which also had no effect.
>
> Regards,
>
> Nathan Gamber
>
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