Re: [Ext2-devel] Re: [RFD] FS behavior (I/O failure) in kernel summit

Andreas Dilger
2005-06-13T20:14:52Z

On Jun 13, 2005 10:59 -0700, Hans Reiser wrote:
> If you write a patch to implement 1a and 3a for reiserfs and reiser4 I
> will accept them. 2a is too vague for me to support --- I can only
> answer the question of whether error conditions are fs independent when
> it is regarding specified error conditions. I suspect there are times
> when it needs to be fs dependent, but only a comprehensive review could
> answer to that.

Hans, it would probably be preferrable to get ext2-like behaviour where
action is configurable (see below), I personally would be annoyed if my
workstation rebooted if there is a read error from the disk.
Better to mark filesystem read-only on error and continue to allow
users to read from rest of filesystem than to just reboot the node.
That is my experience in any case. For those systems where there is
e.g. an HA server with dual-channel disk it might be better to reboot
and failover to another server, but even that isn't clear as a real
media error will just cause both nodes to reboot endlessly instead of
providing the best service they can.

> fs wrote:
> >Dear Linus, Andrew Morton, and all FS maintainers,
> >1) When I/O failure occurs(e.g.: unrecoverable media failure - USB
> >unplug), FS should
> > a. shutdown the FS right now(XFS does this)
> > b. try to make the media serve as long as possible(EXT3 remounts
> > read-only, cache is still valid for read)
> > c. do not care, just print some kernel debugging info(EXT2 JFS
> > ReiserFS)

Actually, 1b is just the default behaviour for ext3 (because of journal
errors). It is also possible to mount the filesystem with error=panic,
which will implement 1a, and it is also possible to mount ext2 with
error=remount-ro (which is default on Debian for ext2) which implements
1b. I don't think it is possible to get 1c behaviour for journal
errors on ext3.

> >2) When I/O failure occurs, FS should
> > a. give a unified error
> > b. give errors according to the FS type

What is "unified error"? Does this mean "-EIO" for all cases? I also
don't understand why this is so important to your application... If
you get an error back from the filesystem that isn't expected, that is
generally a problem regardless of what the error is...

> >3) the returned errno should be
> > a. real cause of failure, e.g. USB unplug returns EIO
> > b. cause from FS, e.g. USB unplug made FS remount read-only,
> > so open(O_RDONLY) returns ENOENT while open(O_RDWR) returns
> > EROFS
> > c. errno means nothing, you already get -1, that's enough

This doesn't make sense. If the "real cause of failure" is that the
journal code detected an inconsistency (it might not be an IO error at
the time, just some structure that is not what it should be, maybe the
user tried to format their partition while in use ;-) then the real
error is that the journal turned the filesystem read-only. In any case,
you can't expect to get more information that "EIO", regardless of the
root cause (e.g. ENOMEM causes async buffer read to not complete, caller
checks buffer_uptodate() and it isn't uptodate, returns EIO).

Cheers, Andreas
--
Andreas Dilger
Principal Software Engineer
Cluster File Systems, Inc.