Re: [Regression] Guest fs corruption with 'block: loop: improve performance via blk-mq'

From: santosh shilimkar
Date: Mon May 18 2015 - 19:39:10 EST


On 5/18/2015 4:25 PM, Ming Lei wrote:
On Tue, May 19, 2015 at 7:13 AM, santosh shilimkar
<santosh.shilimkar@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 5/18/2015 11:07 AM, santosh shilimkar wrote:

On 5/17/2015 6:26 PM, Ming Lei wrote:

Hi Santosh,

Thanks for your report!

On Sun, May 17, 2015 at 4:13 AM, santosh shilimkar
<santosh.shilimkar@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi Ming Lei, Jens,

While doing few tests with recent kernels with Xen Server,
we saw guests(DOMU) disk image getting corrupted while booting it.
Strangely the issue is seen so far only with disk image over ocfs2
volume. If the same image kept on the EXT3/4 drive, no corruption
is observed. The issue is easily reproducible. You see the flurry
of errors while guest is mounting the file systems.

After doing some debug and bisects, we zeroed down the issue with
commit "b5dd2f6 block: loop: improve performance via blk-mq". With
that commit reverted the corruption goes away.

Some more details on the test setup:
1. OVM(XEN) Server kernel(DOM0) upgraded to more recent kernel
which includes commit b5dd2f6. Boot the Server.
2. On DOM0 file system create a ocfs2 volume
3. Keep the Guest(VM) disk image on ocfs2 volume.
4. Boot guest image. (xm create vm.cfg)


I am not familiar with xen, so is the image accessed via
loop block inside of guest VM? Is he loop block created
in DOM0 or guest VM?

Guest. The Guest disk image is represented as a file by loop
device.

5. Observe the VM boot console log. VM itself use the EXT3 fs.
You will see errors like below and after this boot, that file
system/disk-image gets corrupted and mostly won't boot next time.


OK, that means the image is corrupted by VM booting.

Right

[...]


From the debug of the actual data on the disk vs what is read by
the guest VM, we suspect the *reads* are actually not going all
the way to disk and possibly returning the wrong data. Because
the actual data on ocfs2 volume at those locations seems
to be non-zero where as the guest seems to be read it as zero.


Two big changes in the patchset are: 1) use blk-mq request based IO;
2) submit I/O concurrently(write vs. write is still serialized)

Could you apply the patch in below link to see if it can fix the issue?
BTW, this patch only removes concurrent submission.

http://marc.info/?t=143093223200004&r=1&w=2

What kernel is this patch generated against ? It doesn't apply against
v4.0. Does this need the AIO/DIO conversion patches as well. Do you
have the dependent patch-set I can't apply it against v4.0.

Anyways, I created patch(end of the email) against v4.0, based on your patch
and tested it. The corruption is no more seen so it does fix
the issue after backing out concurrent submission changes from
commit b5dd2f6. Let me know whats you plan with it since linus
tip as well as v4.0 needs this fix.

If your issue is caused by concurrent IO submittion, it might be one
issue of ocfs2. As you see, there isn't such problem for ext3/ext4.

As we speak, I got to know about another regression with XFS as well
and am quite confident based on symptom that its similar issue.
I will get a confirmation on the same by tomorrow whether the patch
fixes it or not.

And the single thread patch is introduced for aio/dio support, which
shouldn't have been a fix patch.


Well before the loop blk-mq conversion commit b5dd2f6, the loop driver
was single threaded and as you see that issue seen with that
commit. Now with this experiment, it also proves that those work-queue
split changes are problematic. So am not sure why do you say that it
shouldn't be a fix patch.

Am not denying that the issue could be with OCFS2 or XFS(not proved yet)
but they were happy before that commit ;-)

Regards,
Santosh

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