Re: [PATCH] [RFC] Advanced TCA SCSI Disk Hotswap

From: Randy.Dunlap (rddunlap@osdl.org)
Date: Sun Oct 27 2002 - 15:25:18 EST


On Sun, 27 Oct 2002, Rob Landley wrote:

(maybe wrap lines around column 70 ? :)

...

Stephen Tweedie did something like this already (for 2.4.19-pre10),
called "testdrive". It uses loopback over a block device.
He says that it will need modifications to use bio in 2.5.

See here:
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=102457399020069&w=2

-- 
~Randy

| Hmmm... Not being familiar with the SCSI layer but sticking my nose in anyway | on general block device/mount point hotplug issues: | | How hard would it be to write a simple debugging function to lobotomize a | block device? (So that all further I/O to that sucker immediately returns an | error.) Not just simulating an a hot extraction (or catastrophic failure) of | a block device, but also something you could use to see how gracefully | filesystems react. | | The reason I ask is there was a discussion a while back about the new lazy | unmount (umount -l /blah/foo) not always being quite enough, and that | sometimes what what you want is basically "umount -9 /blah/foo" (ala kill | -9). Close all files, reparent all process home directories and chroot mount | points to a dummy inode, flush all I/O, drive a stake through the | superblock's heart, and scatter the ashes at sea. Somebody posted a patch to | actually do this. (Against 2.4, i think.) I could probably dig it up if you | were curious. Let's see... | | http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=103443466225915&q=raw | | The eject command should certainly have an "umount with shotgun" option, so | zombie processes can't pin your CD in the drive. (Your average end-user is | NOT going to be able to grovel through /proc to figure out which processes | have an open filehandle or home directory under the cdrom mount point so it | can kill them and get the disk out. They're going to power cycle the machine | and eject it while the bios is in charge. I've done this myself a couple of | times when I'm in a hurry.) | | Anyway, if the block device under the filesystem honestly does go away for | hotplug eject reasons, the obvious thing to do is umount -9 the sucker | immediately so userspace can collapse gracefully (or even conceivably | recover). The main difference here is that the flushing would all error out | and get discarded, and this wouldn't always get reported to the user, but | thanks to write cacheing that's the case anyway. (Use some variant of | O_DIRECT or fsync if you care.) The errors userspace does see switch from | "all my I/O failed with a media error" to "all my filehandles closed out from | under me" (and the directory I'm in has been deleted), but that's still | relatively logical behavior. | | Does this sound like it's off in left field? | | Rob

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