Re: Massive NFS problems on large cluster with large number of mounts

Chuck Lever
2008-07-30T22:01:38Z

On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 3:33 PM, Chuck Lever <chuck.lever@oracle.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 30, 2008 at 1:53 PM, J. Bruce Fields <bfields@fieldses.org> wrote:
>> On Mon, Jul 28, 2008 at 04:55:50PM -0400, Chuck Lever wrote:
>>> On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 11:11 AM, Chuck Lever <chuck.lever@oracle.com> wrote:
>>> > On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 10:48 AM, J. Bruce Fields <bfields@fieldses.org> wrote:
>>> >> On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 10:47:25AM -0400, Chuck Lever wrote:
>>> >>> On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 3:06 PM, J. Bruce Fields <bfields@fieldses.org> wrote:
>>> >>> > The immediate problem seems like a kernel bug to me--it seems to me that
>>> >>> > the calls to local daemons should be ignoring {min_,max}_resvport. (Or
>>> >>> > is there some way the daemons can still know that those calls come from
>>> >>> > the local kernel?)
>>> >>>
>>> >>> I tend to agree. The rpcbind client (at least) does specifically
>>> >>> require a privileged port, so a large min/max port range would be out
>>> >>> of the question for those rpc_clients.
>>> >>
>>> >> Any chance I could talk you into doing a patch for that?
>>> >
>>> > I can look at it when I get back next week.
>>>
>>> I've been pondering this.
>>>
>>> It seems like the NFS client is a rather unique case for using
>>> unprivileged ports; most or all of the other RPC clients in the kernel
>>> want to use privileged ports pretty much all the time, and have
>>> learned to switch this off as needed and appropriate. We even have an
>>> internal API feature for doing this: the RPC_CLNT_CREATE_NONPRIVPORT
>>> flag to rpc_create().
>>>
>>> And instead of allowing a wide source port range, it would be better
>>> for the NFS client to use either privileged ports, or unprivileged
>>> ports, but not both, for the same mount point. Otherwise we could be
>>> opening ourselves up for non-deterministic behavior: "How come
>>> sometimes I get EPERM when I try to mount my NFS servers, but other
>>> times the same mount command works fine?" or "Sometimes after a long
>>> idle period my NFS mount points stop working, and all the programs
>>> running on the mount point get EACCES."
>>>
>>> It seems like a good solution would be to:
>>>
>>> 1. Make the xprt_minresvport and xprt_maxresvport sysctls mean what
>>> they say: they are _reserved_ port limits. Thus xprt_maxresvport
>>> should never be allowed to be larger than 1023, and xprt_minresvport
>>> should always be made to be strictly less than xprt_maxresvport; and
>>
>> That would break existing setups: so, someone googles for "nfs linux
>> large numbers of mounts" and comes across:
>>
>> http://marc.info/?l=linux-nfs&m=121509091004851&w=2
>>
>> They add
>>
>> echo 2000 >/proc/sys/sunrpc/max_resvport
>>
>> to their initscripts, and their problem goes away. A year later, with
>> this incident long forgotten, they upgrade their kernel, start getting
>> failed mounts, and in the worst case end up debugging the whole problem
>> from scratch again.
>
>>> 2. Introduce a mechanism to specifically enable the NFS client to use
>>> non-privileged ports. It could be a new mount option like "insecure"
>>> (which is what some other O/Ses use) or "unpriv-source-port" for
>>> example. I tend to dislike the former because such a feature is
>>> likely to be quite useful with Kerberos-authenticated NFS, and
>>> "sec=krb5,insecure" is probably a little funny looking, but
>>> "sec=krb5,unpriv-source-port" makes it pretty clear what is going on.
>>
>> But I can see the argument for the mount option.
>>
>> Maybe we could leave the meaning of the sysctls alone, and allowing
>> noresvport as an alternate way to allow use of nonreserved ports?
>>
>> In any case, this all seems a bit orthogonal to the problem of what
>> ports the rpcbind client uses, right?
>
> No, this is exactly the original problem. The reason xprt_maxresvport
> is allowed to go larger than 1023 is to permit more NFS mounts. There
> really is no other reason for it I can think of.
>
> But it's broken (or at least inconsistent) behavior that max_resvport
> can go past 1023 in the first place. The name is "max_resvport" --
> Maximum Reserved Port. A port value of more than 1024 is not a
> reserved port. These sysctls are designed to restrict the range of
> ports used when a _reserved_ port is requested, not when _any_ source
> port is requested. Trond's suggestion is an "off label" use of this
> facility.
>
> And rpcbind isn't the only kernel-level RPC service that requires a
> reserved port. The kernel-level NSM code that calls user space, for
> example, is one such service. In other words, rpcbind isn't the only
> service that could potentially hit this issue, so an rpcbind-only fix
> would be incomplete.
>
> We already have an appropriate interface for kernel RPC services to
> request a non-privileged port. The NFS client should use that
> interface.
>
> Now, we don't have to change both at the same time. We can introduce
> the mount option now; the default reserved port range is still good.
> And eventually folks using the sysctl will hit the rpcbind bug (or a
> lock recovery problem), trace it back to this issue, and change their
> mount options and reset their resvport sysctls.

Unfortunately we are out of NFS_MOUNT_ flags: there are already 16
defined and this is a legacy kernel ABI, so I'm not sure if we are
allowed to use the upper 16 bits in the flags word.

Will think about this more.

> At some later point, though, the maximum should be restricted to 1023.
>
>>> Such an "insecure" mount option would then set
>>> RPC_CLNT_CREATE_NONPRIVPORT on rpc_clnt's created on behalf of the NFS
>>> client.
>>>
>>> I'm not married to the names of the options, or even using a mount
>>> option at all (although that seems like a natural place to put such a
>>> feature).
>>>
>>> Thoughts?
>
> --
> Chuck Lever
>

--
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--Dr. Evil