Re: [patch 0/9] writeback data integrity and other fixes (take 3)

Nick Piggin
2008-10-29T00:04:47Z

On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 09:27:46AM +1100, Dave Chinner wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 04:39:53PM +0100, Nick Piggin wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 01:47:15AM +1100, npiggin@suse.de wrote:
> > I haven't seen any -EIO failures from XFS... maybe I'm just not doing the
> > right thing, or there is a caveat I'm not aware of.
> >
> > All fault injections I noticed had a trace like this:
[...]
>
> XFS reports bio errors through the I/O completion path, not the
> submission path.

Right, that's just to give you an indication of where it's failing...

> > And the kernel would sometimes say this:
> > Buffer I/O error on device ram0, logical block 279
> > lost page write due to I/O error on ram0
> > Buffer I/O error on device ram0, logical block 379
> > lost page write due to I/O error on ram0
> > Buffer I/O error on device ram0, logical block 389
> > lost page write due to I/O error on ram0
>
> Yes - that's coming from end_buffer_async_write() when an error is
> reported in bio completion. This does:
>
> 465 set_bit(AS_EIO, &page->mapping->flags);
> 466 set_buffer_write_io_error(bh);
> 467 clear_buffer_uptodate(bh);
> 468 SetPageError(page);
>
> Hmmmm - do_fsync() calls filemap_fdatawait() which ends up in
> wait_on_page_writeback_range() which is appears to be checking the
> mapping flags for errors. I wonder why that error is not being
> propagated then? AFAICT both XFS and the fsync code are doing the
> right thing but somewhere the error has gone missing...

Yeah, I couldn't immediately see why nothing comes out. I'll do a bit
more digging.

> > I think I also saw a slab bug when running dbench with fault injection on.
> > Running latest Linus kernel.
[...]
>
> Now that is interesting.
>
> We've got a rolling transaction in progress, and the commit of the
> first part of the transaction has got the I/O error. That frees the
> transaction structure used during that commit, as well as the
> ticket.
>
> However, before we committed the initial transaction, we duplicated
> the transaction structure to allow the transaction to continue to
> track all the dirty objects in the first commit. That included
> duplicating the pointer to the ticket.
>
> Then the EIO is returned to mkdir code with the duplicated
> transaction, which is then cancelled, and that frees the transaction
> and the ticket it holds. However, we'd already freed the ticket.
>
> Ok, we're only seeing this problem now because I recently modified
> the ticket allocation to use a slab instead of a roll-your-own free
> list structure that wouldn't have been poisoned. Nice to know that
> this change did more than just remove code. ;)
>
> This might take a little while to fix - a lot of code needs
> auditing - but thanks for reporting the problem.

No problem, hope it helps.

Thanks,
Nick