Re: Test generic/299 stalling forever

Jens Axboe
2016-10-12T15:49:25Z

On 09/28/2016 10:37 PM, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 19, 2015 at 09:34:30AM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
>> On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 11:53:37AM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
>>> I've been trying to figure out why generic/299 has occasionally been
>>> stalling forever. After taking a closer look, it appears the problem
>>> is that the fio process is stalling in userspace. Looking at the ps
>>> listing, the fio process hasn't run in over six hours, and using
>>> attaching strace to the fio process, it's stalled in a FUTUEX_WAIT.
>>>
>>> Has anyone else seen this? I'm using fio 2.2.6, and I have a feeling
>>> that I started seeing this when I started using a newer version of
>>> fio. So I'm going to try roll back to an older version of fio and see
>>> if that causes the problem to go away.
>>
>> I'm running on fio 2.1.3 at the moment and I havne't seen any
>> problems like this for months. Keep in mind that fio does tend to
>> break in strange ways fairly regularly, so I'd suggest an
>> upgrade/downgrade of fio as your first move.
>
> Out of curiosity, Dave, are you still using fio 2.1.3? I had upgraded
> to the latest fio to fix other test breaks, and I'm stil seeing the
> occasional generic/299 test failure. In fact, it's been happening
> often enough on one of my test platforms[1] that I decided to really
> dig down and investigate it, and all of the threads were blocking on
> td->verify_cond in fio's verify.c.
>
> It bisected down to this commit:
>
> commit e5437a073e658e8154b9e87bab5c7b3b06ed4255
> Author: Vasily Tarasov <tarasov@vasily.name>
> Date: Sun Nov 9 20:22:24 2014 -0700
>
> Fix for a race when fio prints I/O statistics periodically
>
> Below is the demonstration for the latest code in git:
> ...
>
> So generic/299 passes reliably with this commits parent, and it fails
> on this commit within a dozen tries or so. The commit first landed in
> fio 2.1.14, so it's consistent with Dave's report a year ago he was
> still using fio 2.1.3.
>
> I haven't had time to do a deep analysis on what fio/verify.c does, or
> the above patch, but the good news is that when fio hangs, it's just a
> userspace hang, so I can log into machine and attach a gdb to the
> process. The code in question isn't very well documented, so I'm
> sending this out in the hopes that Jens and Vasily might see something
> obvious, and because I'm curious whether anyone else has seen this
> (since it seems to be a timing-related race in fio, so it's likely a
> file system independent issue).
>
> Thanks,
>
> - Ted
>
> [1] When running xfstests in a Google Compute Engine VM with a
> SSD-backed Persistent disk, using a n1-standard-2 machine type with a
> recent kernel testing with ext4, the command "gce-xfstests -C 100
> generic/299" will hang within a dozen runs of the test, so -C 100 to
> run the test a hundred times was definitely overkill --- in fact
> usually in fio would hang after less than a half-dozen runs.
>
> My bisecting technique (using the infrastructure at
> https://github.com/tytso/xfstests-bld) was:
>
> ./build-all --fio-only
> make tarball
> gce-xfstests --update-xfstests -C 100 generic/299
>
> and then wait for an hour or so and see whether or not fio was hanging
> or not, and then follow it up with "(cd fio ; git bisect good)" or
> "(cd fio ; git bisect bad)" as appropriate. I was using a Debian
> jessie build chroot to compile fio and all of xfstests-bld.

Sorry for being late to the party here, was away. This issue should be
fixed in newer versions. Can you update to current -git and check that
it works without hangs?

--
Jens Axboe