Re: panic on 4.20 server exporting xfs filesystem

J. Bruce Fields
2015-03-19T18:47:17Z

On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 06:27:31PM +0100, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
> FYI, I've now managed to reproduce the issue. I haven't had time
> to dig deeper, but it smells a lot like a callback path issue.
>
> Can you send the recursion fix to Linus ASAP and I'll send you a patch
> to turn the nopnfs option into a pnfs one, so we're at least doing
> fine for 4.0 in any case.

Sure, sounds good.

Also, there's the problem that when this is turned on a client can end
up doing unnecessary LAYOUTGET. Do we have a plan for that?

Possibilities:

- Just depend on export flags: but some clients may have direct
access and some not. If the clients with direct access or all
easily identifiable by IP subnet, maybe it's not a big deal.
Still, seems like an administrative hassle.

- Do nothing, assume the client can deal with this with some
kind of heuristics, and/or that the GETLAYOUT calls can be
made very cheap. Not sure if that's true.

- Use something like GETDEVLICELIST so the client can figure out
in one go whether any layouts on a given filesystem will work.
I forget what the problems with GETDEVICELIST were.

> I hope to debug this and may even have
> a real fix soon, but so far I don't know how long it will take.

OK, thanks.

--b.