Re: [PATCH v5 00/17] fs: introduce new writeback error reporting and convert ext2 and ext4 to use it

[Jeff Layton]

On Wed, 2017-05-31 at 13:27 -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> On Wed, 31 May 2017 08:45:23 -0400 Jeff Layton <jlayton@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > This is v5 of the patchset to improve how we're tracking and reporting
> > errors that occur during pagecache writeback.
> 
> I'm curious to know how you've been testing this?

>  Is that testing
> strong enough for us to be confident that all nature of I/O errors
> will be reported to userspace?
> 

That's a tall order. This is a difficult thing to test as these sorts of
errors are pretty rare by nature.

I have an xfstest that I posted just after this set that demonstrates
that it works correctly, at least on ext2/3/4 when run by the ext4
driver (ext2 legacy driver reports too many errors currently). I had
btrfs and xfs working on that test too in an earlier incarnation of this
set, so I think we can fix this in them as well without too much
difficulty.

I'm happy to run other tests if someone wants to suggest them.

Now, all that said, I don't think this will make things any worse than
they are today as far as reporting errors properly to userland goes.
It's rather easy for an incidental synchronous writeback request from an
internal caller to clear the AS_* flags today. This will at least ensure
that we're reporting errors since a well-defined point in time when you
call fsync.
-- 
Jeff Layton <jlayton@xxxxxxxxxx>