Re: [RFC PATCH 0/7] dm: fix issues with swapping dm tables

Benjamin Marzinski
2025-03-10T16:38:25Z

On Mon, Mar 10, 2025 at 08:16:43AM +0900, Damien Le Moal wrote:
> On 3/10/25 07:28, Benjamin Marzinski wrote:
> > There were multiple places in dm's __bind() function where it could fail
> > and not completely roll back, leaving the device using the the old
> > table, but with device limits and resources from the new table.
> > Additionally, unused mempools for request-based devices were not always
> > freed immediately.
> >
> > Finally, there were a number of issues with switching zoned tables that
> > emulate zone append (in other words, dm-crypt on top of zoned devices).
> > dm_blk_report_zones() could be called while the device was suspended and
> > modifying zoned resources or could possibly fail to end a srcu read
> > section. More importantly, blk_revalidate_disk_zones() would never get
> > called when updating a zoned table. This could cause the dm device to
> > see the wrong zone write offsets, not have a large enough zwplugs
> > reserved in its mempool, or read invalid memory when checking the
> > conventional zones bitmap.
> >
> > This patchset fixes these issues. It does not make it so that
> > device-mapper is able to load any zoned table from any other zoned
> > table. Zoned dm-crypt devices can be safely grown and shrunk, but
> > reloading a zoned dm-crypt device to, for instance, point at a
> > completely different underlying device won't work correctly. IO might
> > fail since the zone write offsets of the dm-crypt device will not be
> > updated for all the existing zones with plugs. If the new device's zone
> > offsets don't match the old device's offsets, IO to the zone will fail.
> > If the ability to switch tables from a zoned dm-crypt device to an
> > abritry other zoned dm-crypt device is important to people, it could be
> > done as long as there are no plugged zones when dm suspends.
>
> Thanks for fixing this.
>
> Given that in the general case switching tables will always likely result in
> unaligned write errors, I think we should just report a ENOTSUPP error if the
> user attempts to swap tables.

If we don't think there's any interest in growing or shrinking zoned
dm-crypt devices, that's fine. I do think we should make an exception
for switching to the dm-error target. We specifically call that out with
DM_TARGET_WILDCARD so that we can always switch to it from any table if
we just want to fail out all the IO.

-Ben

> > This patchset also doesn't touch the code for switching from a zoned to
> > a non-zoned device. Switching from a zoned dm-crypt device to a
> > non-zoned device is problematic if there are plugged zones, since the
> > underlying device will not be prepared to handle these plugged writes.
> > Switching to a target that does not pass down IOs, like the dm-error
> > target, is fine. So is switching when there are no plugged zones, except
> > that we do not free the zoned resources in this case, even though we
> > safely could.
>
> This is another case that does not make much sense in practice. So instead of
> still allowing it knowing that it most likely will not work, we should return
> ENOTSUPP here too I think.
>
> > If people are interested in removing some of these limitations, I can
> > send patches for them, but I'm not sure how much extra code we want,
> > just to support niche zoned dm-crypt reloads.
>
> I have never heard any complaints/bug reports from people attempting this. Which
> likely means that no-one is needing/trying to do this. So as mentionned above,
> we should make sure that this feature is not reported as not supported with a
> ENOTSUPP error, and maybe a warning.
>
>
>
> --
> Damien Le Moal
> Western Digital Research