Re: [RFC PATCH 0/2] ceph: safely use 'copy-from' Op on Octopus OSDs

[Luis Henriques]

On Fri, Nov 08, 2019 at 04:15:35PM +0100, Ilya Dryomov wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 8, 2019 at 3:15 PM Luis Henriques <lhenriques@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > Hi!
> >
> > (Sorry for the long cover letter!)
> 
> This is exactly what cover letters are for!
> 
> >
> > Since the fix for [1] has finally been merged and should be available in
> > the next (Octopus) ceph release, I'm trying to clean-up my kernel client
> > patch that tries to find out whether or not it's safe to use the
> > 'copy-from' RADOS operation for copy_file_range.
> >
> > So, the fix for [1] was to modify the 'copy-from' operation to allow
> > clients to optionally (using the CEPH_OSD_COPY_FROM_FLAG_TRUNCATE_SEQ
> > flag) send the extra truncate_seq and truncate_size parameters.  Since
> > only Octopus will have this fix (no backports planned), the client
> > simply needs to ensure the OSDs being used have SERVER_OCTOPUS in their
> > features.
> >
> > My initial solution was to add an extra test in __submit_request,
> > looping all the request ops and checking if the connection has the
> > required features for that operation.  Obviously, at the moment only the
> > copy-from operation has a restriction but I guess others may be added in
> > the future.  I believe that doing this at this point (__submit_request)
> > allows to cover cases where a cluster is being upgraded to Octopus and
> > we have different OSDs running with different feature bits.
> >
> > Unfortunately, this solution is racy because the connection state
> > machine may be changing and the peer_features field isn't yet set.  For
> > example: if the connection to an OSD is being re-open when we're about
> > to check the features, the con->state will be CON_STATE_PREOPEN and the
> > con->peer_features will be 0.  I tried to find ways to move the feature
> > check further down in the stack, but that can't be easily done without
> > adding more infrastructure.  A solution that came to my mind was to add
> > a new con->ops, invoked in the context of ceph_con_workfn, under the
> > con->mutex.  This callback could then verify the available features,
> > aborting the operation if needed.
> >
> > Note that the race in this patchset doesn't seem to be a huge problem,
> > other than occasionally reverting to a VFS generic copy_file_range, as
> > -EOPNOTSUPP will be returned here.  But it's still a race, and there are
> > probably other cases that I'm missing.
> >
> > Anyway, maybe I'm missing an obvious solution for checking these OSD
> > features, but I'm open to any suggestions on other options (or some
> > feedback on the new callback in ceph_connection_operations option).
> >
> > [1] https://tracker.ceph.com/issues/37378
> 
> If the OSD checked for unknown flags, like newer syscalls do, it would
> be super easy, but it looks like it doesn't.
> 
> An obvious solution is to look at require_osd_release in osdmap, but we
> don't decode that in the kernel because it lives the OSD portion of the
> osdmap.  We could add that and consider the fact that the client now
> needs to decode more than just the client portion a design mistake.
> I'm not sure what can of worms does that open and if copy-from alone is
> worth it though.  Perhaps that field could be moved to (or a copy of it
> be replicated in) the client portion of the osdmap starting with
> octopus?  We seem to be running into it on the client side more and
> more...

I can't say I'm thrilled with the idea of going back to hack into the
OSDs code again, I was hoping to be able to handle this with the
information we already have on the connection peer_features field.  It
took me *months* to have the OSD fix merged in so I'm not really
convinced a change to the osdmap would make it into Octopus :-)

(But I'll have a look at this and see if I can understand what moving or
replicating the field in the osdmap would really entail.)

> Given the track record of this feature (the fix for the most recently
> discovered data corrupting bug hasn't even merged yet), I would be very
> hesitant to turn it back on by default even if we figure out a good
> solution for the feature check.  In my opinion, it should stay opt-in.

Ok, makes sense.

And thanks a lot for your feedback, Ilya.

Cheers,
--
Luís