Re: [PATCH][RESEND] multipath: check if a device belongs to multipath

[Benjamin Marzinski <bmarzins@redhat.com>]

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 07:50:31PM +0200, Christophe Varoqui wrote:
> On lun., 2012-08-20 at 12:43 -0500, Benjamin Marzinski wrote:
> > On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 02:15:21PM +0200, Hannes Reinecke wrote:
> > > On 08/17/2012 10:13 PM, Christophe Varoqui wrote:
> > > > On ven., 2012-07-27 at 15:55 -0500, Benjamin Marzinski wrote:
> > > >> This patch adds a new multipath option "-c", which checks if a device
> > > >> belongs to multipath.  This can be done during the add uevent for the
> > > >> device, before the multipath device has even been created.  This allows
> > > >> udev to be able to handle multipath path devices differently.  To do
> > > >> this multipath now keeps track of the wwids of all previously created
> > > >> multipath devices in /etc/multipath/wwids. The file creating and
> > > >> editting code from alias.[ch] has been split out into file.[ch]. When a
> > > >> device is checked to see if it's a multipath path, it's wwid is
> > > >> compared against the ones in the wwids file. Also, since the
> > > >> uid_attribute may not have been added to the udev database entry for
> > > >> the device if this is called in a udev rule, when using the "-c" option,
> > > >> get_uid will now also check the process' envirionment variables for the
> > > >> uid_attribute.
> > > >>
> > > > I'd like other distribution maintainers' comments on this one, as it
> > > > impacts the multipath-tools intregration with udev.
> > > > 
> > > > Hannes ? Did you face the same issue with SuSE ? Did you solve it
> > > > differently ?
> > > > 
> > > No; currently I didn't solve it at all, what with me being tied up
> > > with customer issues :-(
> > > 
> > > But this is basically the approach I've discussed with Harald Hoyer
> > > and Kay Sievers on how we should facilitate proper systemd integration.
> > > 
> > > The idea here is to have a udev rule calling 'multipath -c' via
> > > PROGRAM, so that udev can detect if a device should've been handled
> > > via multipath.
> > > Which would allow any rules following that one to evaluate this
> > > status and possibly skip the device.
> > > 
> > > So from that perspective the patch should be okay.
> > > 
> > > However, the one thing to note is this patch _again_ is using
> > > hard-coded filenames under /etc, which really shouldn't happen.
> > > We should be introducing a configuration file variable to set it.
> > 
> > I'll post a patch that adds a configuration parameter soon.
> > 
> > > 
> > > > Ben, does this approach supersedes/extends the "complicated blacklisting
> > > > scheme" you proposed earlier ?
> > > > 
> > > I sincerely hope so ...
> > 
> > actually, this is patch is what I though were the non-objectional parts
> > to that patch.  I still think it's useful to be able to setup multipath
> > so that instead of defaulting to use all the non-blacklisted LUNs, it
> > just defaults to using the LUNs which actually have multiple paths. That
> > patch didn't effect how the blacklisting code worked. Nor did it keep you
> > from setting up multipath on single pathed LUNs. It just didn't default
> > to setting up multipath devices on single pathed LUNs, if you had never
> > set up a multipath device on that LUN before. 
> > 
> Ok fine. Do you prefer I merge the already submitted patch so that you
> can submit an incremental patch for the cache file location or I wait
> for your submitting a feature-complete patch ?
> 
> Thanks for the clarification.

The existing patch could have stood to be broken up in the interest of
easy reading. I don't want to make it any larger. I'll just send a
second patch that adds the multipath.conf option.

Thanks.

-Ben 

> 
> cvaroqui,
> OpenSVC