9.3.4: resync after a crashed Primary misses blocks (silent divergence) if that node was promoted in place after being Secondary under another Primary

9.3.4: resync after a crashed Primary misses blocks (silent divergence) if that node was promoted in place after being Secondary under another Primary

[Dominic]

Hello,

Last week I reported the two-volume flush stall (thank you for the quick
confirmation). While testing our failover design, we found another
problem on 9.3.4. This one is a silent divergence, so I wanted you to
know about it.

SUMMARY

Node A has been Secondary while node B was Primary. A is then promoted
in place, with no down/attach in between. A writes after a disconnect
and goes down without demoting (as a root-on-DRBD Primary does at
shutdown). When A comes back, it is SyncSource and the resync completes
normally. But some blocks that A wrote after the disconnect are not
resynced, so the two disks then differ while both report UpToDate.

If A is taken down and up (detach/attach) before the in-place
promotion, the resync is correct.

ENVIRONMENT

- drbd-dkms 9.3.4-1ppa1~resolute1 (GIT-hash e59b287b199f), drbd-utils
  9.35.0-1ppa1~resolute1 (LINBIT PPA)
- Ubuntu 26.04, kernel 7.0.0-38-generic, two VirtualBox VMs
- 2 nodes, protocol C, one resource with 2 volumes, external metadata,
  auto-promote no, no fencing. al-extents 6433. Same r0.res as in my
  24 Oct report.
- The Ubuntu drbd-utils units drbd-graceful-disconnect.service (active)
  and drbd-graceful-down.service (masked on A, to mimic a root-on-DRBD
  Primary that can't demote) are in use.
- Every "up" is attach first (adjust --skip-net, then adjust), to avoid
  the bug from my last report.
- Not tried on git master.

REPRODUCTION (A = pm1, node-id 0; B = pm2, node-id 1; ext4 on volume 0)

1. Connected, both UpToDate, both Secondary.
2. On B: drbdadm primary r0; mount /dev/drbd0; write a file; umount;
   drbdadm secondary r0. (Still connected throughout; A stays up.)
3. On A, with no down/up: drbdadm primary r0; mount /dev/drbd0; write
   10 MiB to a file; sync.
4. On A: systemctl reboot. drbd-graceful-disconnect disconnects first
   (B goes Outdated). The ext4 unmount then writes the superblock etc.
   after the disconnect. A never demotes (graceful-down is masked).
5. A boots; drbdadm adjust --skip-net r0; drbdadm adjust r0.
   A reports "Marked additional 0 KB as out-of-sync based on AL", is
   SyncSource and resyncs; both volumes end UpToDate.
6. Compare the backing devices: volume 0 differs.

Reproduced 3 times out of 3 (two scripted runs and one first sighting).

RESULTS

Failing run (with step 2), volume 0:

  pm1 kernel: drbd r0/0 drbd0 pm2: self B83C73CDF184048C:74B0ADF14B06F564:DA5CAA724336D98E:A923FA7E7C56E246 bits:3072 flags:2022
  pm1 kernel: drbd r0/0 drbd0 pm2: peer 74B0ADF14B06F564:0000000000000000:A923FA7E7C56E246:D8B36CA284BD34EA bits:0 flags:120
  pm1 kernel: drbd r0/0 drbd0 pm2: uuid_compare()=source-use-bitmap by rule=bitmap-self
  pm1 kernel: drbd r0/0 drbd0 pm2: Began resync as SyncSource (will sync 12288 KB [3072 bits set]).
  after resync: md5 of the volume 0 backing device differs between the
  nodes; the differing 4 KiB blocks are block 0 (4 MiB extent 0, the ext4
  superblock) and block 65536 (offset 256 MiB, extent 64). Volume 1
  matches.

Control without step 2 (A was never Secondary under a Primary B):
same sequence otherwise, "will sync 24576 KB [6144 bits set]", and the
checksums match afterwards.

Control with step 2 plus "drbdadm down r0; adjust --skip-net; adjust"
on A before step 3: 6144 bits, checksums match.

So the bitmap A brings back covers 3072 bits instead of 6144, and the
missing part includes blocks A wrote after the disconnect.

OUR GUESS AT THE MECHANISM (not verified in the code)

While B was Primary, we see "Disabling local AL-updates (optimization)"
and later "Enabling local AL-updates" in the logs. We suspect that
extents made active in A's in-memory activity log while it was
Secondary (from B's replicated writes) stay "hot" after A is promoted.
A's own later writes to those extents then cause no on-disk AL
transaction. A never demotes, so its in-memory bitmap is never written
out. After the crash, applying the on-disk AL doesn't cover those
extents, so their blocks are never resynced. The affected extents
(0 and 64) are exactly the ones B wrote while it was Primary, which
fits this. The detach/attach control also fits it.

IMPACT AND OUR WORKAROUND

The disks diverge silently: both sides report UpToDate after a
"successful" resync. Our production design promotes only from a fresh
initramfs (attach, then primary), so we are not exposed. Anyone who
promotes a long-running Secondary in place and later loses that Primary
without a clean demote could be. We worked around it by always doing
down/up before a promotion. We repaired the test VMs with
"drbdadm invalidate-remote" and confirmed with checksums.

We have the full kernel logs from both nodes, the scripts, and the VMs
(powered off), and can re-run anything you'd like, including a build
from git.

Best regards,
Dominic