Re: LVM snapshot broke between 4.14 and 4.16

From: WGH
Date: Thu Aug 02 2018 - 17:39:29 EST


On 08/03/2018 12:32 AM, WGH wrote:
> On 08/02/2018 09:32 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>> WGH (sorry, no idea what your real name is) - what's the source of the
>> script that broke? Was it some system script you got from outside and
>> likely to affect others too?
>>
>> Or was it just some local thing you wrote yourself and was
>> unintentionally buggy and nobody else is likely to hit this?
>>
>> Because if the latter, if you can work around it and you're the only
>> user this hits, we might just be able to ignore it.
> The script in question is written by me and contains literally two lines:
>
> ÂÂÂ lvcreate --size 5G --snapshot --name snap0 --permission r
> /dev/mapper/vg0-lvol_rootfs
> ÂÂÂ mount /dev/mapper/vg0-snap0 /mnt/rootfs_snapshot
>
> The script is not buggy (I think), it was written under simple
> assumption that --permission r works. And it does - unless you happen to
> have combination of kernel >=4.16 and lvm2 <2.02.178.
>
> The commit in question appeared only in 4.16, and this kernel version is
> not widespread yet. You have to be running both recent kernel and
> not-so-recent lvm2 to be bitten by this. This probably explains why no
> one else reported this problem.
>
> Workaround certainly exists: I can just create read-write snapshot, but
> mount it read-only. The reason why I didn't discover the workaround
> earlier is that after unsuccessful read-only snapshot creation system
> ends up in some weird state where read-write snapshots are also failing
> with the same error (until reboot). So I got a wrong impression that
> read-write snapshots were broken as well.
>
I've just found one public report of this bug, though:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=900442