Re: Possible io_uring related race leads to btrfs data csum mismatch

Jens Axboe
2023-08-16T14:34:59Z

On 8/16/23 12:52 AM, Qu Wenruo wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Recently I'm digging into a very rare failure during btrfs/06[234567],
> where btrfs scrub detects unrepairable data corruption.
>
> After days of digging, I have a much smaller reproducer:
>
> ```
> fail()
> {
> echo "!!! FAILED !!!"
> exit 1
> }
>
> workload()
> {
> mkfs.btrfs -f -m single -d single --csum sha256 $dev1
> mount $dev1 $mnt
> # There are around 10 more combinations with different
> # seed and -p/-n parameters, but this is the smallest one
> # I found so far.
> $fsstress -p 7 -n 50 -s 1691396493 -w -d $mnt
> umount $mnt
> btrfs check --check-data-csum $dev1 || fail
> }
> runtime=1024
> for (( i = 0; i < $runtime; i++ )); do
> echo "=== $i / $runtime ==="
> workload
> done
> ```

Tried to reproduce this, both on a vm and on a real host, and no luck so
far. I've got a few followup questions as your report is missing some
important info:

1) What kernel are you running?
2) What's the .config you are using?

> At least here, with a VM with 6 cores (host has 8C/16T), fast enough
> storage (PCIE4.0 NVME, with unsafe cache mode), it has the chance around
> 1/100 to hit the error.

What does "unsafe cche mode" mean? Is that write back caching enabled?
Write back caching with volatile write cache? For your device, can you
do:

$ grep . /sys/block/$dev/queue/*

> Checking the fsstress verbose log against the failed file, it turns out
> to be an io_uring write.

Any more details on what the write looks like?

> And with uring_write disabled in fsstress, I have no longer reproduced
> the csum mismatch, even with much larger -n and -p parameters.

Is it more likely to reproduce with larger -n/-p in general?

> However I didn't see any io_uring related callback inside btrfs code,
> any advice on the io_uring part would be appreciated.

io_uring doesn't do anything special here, it uses the normal page cache
read/write parts for buffered IO. But you may get extra parallellism
with io_uring here. For example, with the buffered write that this most
likely is, libaio would be exactly the same as a pwrite(2) on the file.
If this would've blocked, io_uring would offload this to a helper
thread. Depending on the workload, you could have multiple of those in
progress at the same time.

--
Jens Axboe