Re: [ext4 io hang] buffered write io hang in balance_dirty_pages

Matthew Wilcox
2023-05-04T16:21:32Z

On Thu, May 04, 2023 at 09:59:52AM -0600, Keith Busch wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 27, 2023 at 10:20:28AM +0800, Ming Lei wrote:
> > Hello Guys,
> >
> > I got one report in which buffered write IO hangs in balance_dirty_pages,
> > after one nvme block device is unplugged physically, then umount can't
> > succeed.
> >
> > Turns out it is one long-term issue, and it can be triggered at least
> > since v5.14 until the latest v6.3.
> >
> > And the issue can be reproduced reliably in KVM guest:
> >
> > 1) run the following script inside guest:
> >
> > mkfs.ext4 -F /dev/nvme0n1
> > mount /dev/nvme0n1 /mnt
> > dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/z.img&
> > sleep 10
> > echo 1 > /sys/block/nvme0n1/device/device/remove
> >
> > 2) dd hang is observed and /dev/nvme0n1 is gone actually
>
> Sorry to jump in so late.
>
> For an ungraceful nvme removal, like a surpirse hot unplug, the driver
> sets the capacity to 0 and that effectively ends all dirty page writers
> that could stall forward progress on the removal. And that 0 capacity
> should also cause 'dd' to exit.
>
> But this is not an ungraceful removal, so we're not getting that forced
> behavior. Could we use the same capacity trick here after flushing any
> outstanding dirty pages?

There's a filesystem mounted on that block device, though. I don't
think the filesystem is going to notice the underlying block device
capacity change and break out of any of these functions.