From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Wols Lists Subject: Re: [PATCH 1/2] raid5-cache: update superblock at shutdown/reboot Date: Thu, 17 Nov 2016 09:44:39 +0000 Message-ID: <582D7C07.8060507@youngman.org.uk> References: <5d6f023fb1d1398317d07f02634f90b055e26f4b.1479345454.git.shli@fb.com> <87wpg2heg8.fsf@notabene.neil.brown.name> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <87wpg2heg8.fsf@notabene.neil.brown.name> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: NeilBrown , Shaohua Li , linux-raid@vger.kernel.org Cc: songliubraving@fb.com, Zhengyuan Liu List-Id: linux-raid.ids On 17/11/16 05:18, NeilBrown wrote: > On Thu, Nov 17 2016, Shaohua Li wrote: > >> Currently raid5-cache update superblock in .quiesce. But since at >> shutdown/reboot, .quiesce is called with reconfig mutex locked, >> superblock isn't guaranteed to be called in reclaim thread (see >> 8e018c21da3). This will make assemble do unnecessary journal recovery. >> It doesn't corrupt data but is annoying. This adds an extra hook to >> guarantee journal is flushed to raid disks. And since this hook is >> called before superblock update, this will guarantee we have a uptodate >> superblock in shutdown/reboot > > Hi. > I don't quite follow some of the reasoning here. > In particular, the ->stop_writes() that you have implemented > does almost exactly the same thing as r5l_quiesce(1). > So why not simply call ->quiesce(mddev, 1) in __md_stop_writes()?? > You probably need to also call ->quiesce(mddev, 0) to keep things > balanced. > > Also you have introduced a static mutex (which isn't my favourite sort > of thing) without giving any explanation why in the changelog comment. > So I cannot easily see if that addition is at all justified. > > Thanks, > NeilBrown > I need to be careful I don't ruffle any feathers here ... But this is saying to me this is a nice feature that hasn't been properly spec'd and thought through. Don't get me wrong, I know that - in typical linux fashion - people have been adding things, and raid has "just growed" topsy fashion. So it's incredibly difficult to spec a new feature when you don't have a spec for the stuff you're building it on. Anyways, what I'm saying is, it seems to me this caching stuff (it's a new feature, iirc) would be great for trying to write out a proper spec of what's meant to be going on. It'll roll over into spec'ing the stuff it relies on ... And yes, I *AM* volunteering to do the work - as I said elsewhere, I want to put a load of kerneldoc into the raid source, and get to understand it all, but the downside is you'll get a lot of newbie-ish questions from me trying to get to grips with what's going on. I'm an experienced C programmer but kernel style is alien to me - you know the disconnect when you're reading something, you can read the words easily, but you can't decipher the meaning. That's how I feel reading the kernel source at the moment. Are we up for it? Cheers, Wol