Re: dm-cache not writing out cache metadata at reboot?

[Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>]

On Thu, May 09 2013 at  4:36pm -0400,
Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com> wrote:

> On Wed, May 08, 2013 at 06:05:26PM -0400, Mike Snitzer wrote:
> > On Wed, May 08 2013 at  5:48pm -0400,
> > Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong@oracle.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > Hi,
> > > 
> > > So I've been watching the hit/miss counters in dmcache and I've noticed a
> > > couple of things that look like errors to me:
> > > 
> > > First, I noticed that if I reboot the system, neither cache_postsuspend nor
> > > cache_dtr get called.  This might simply be expected behavior, but it means
> > > that the in-memory superblock structure doesn't get written out to disk upon
> > > reboot.  Just to be sure, I put a printk into __commit_transaction.  It prints
> > > out for 'dmsetup info' and 'dmsetup remove' but nothing at reboot.
> > 
> > We don't have reboot notifiers that auto-magically tear down an
> > artbitrary DM stack.  Typically the device shutdown includes unmounting
> > filesystems, stopping LVM (which tears down DM devices, etc).
> > 
> > So given that we don't have any userspace LVM2 support for dm-cache yet
> > I'm not surprised by this.  In fact it is expected.
> >  
> > > Second, cache_status calls dm_cache_commit, which writes out a superblock to
> > > the metadata device.  However, there's no call to save_stats to copy the
> > > current values of the counters out to the disk's copy prior to calling
> > > dm_cache_commit.  Therefore, we seem to be writing out stale copies of
> > > superblock fields.
> > > 
> > > The second one seems fixable with the attached patch
> > 
> > I'll defer to Joe on this but I think sync_metadata() is pretty heavy to
> > be doing every 'dmsetup info'.  BTW, with just dm_cache_commit() the
> > superblock fields aren't stale; only the on-disk hints are.
> 
> Hrmm, how about this: dmsetup info will call save_stats so that the superblock
> gets written with the freshest hit/miss counts, and I'll create a new dmsetup
> message command that actually flushes everything out?

That sounds better.