53 lines
2.9 KiB
Text
53 lines
2.9 KiB
Text
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Development notes regarding libbdev, by David van Moolenbroek.
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GENERAL MODEL
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This library is designed mainly for use by file servers. It essentially covers
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two use cases: 1) use of the block device that contains the file system itself,
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and 2) use of any block device for raw block I/O (on unmounted file systems)
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performed by the root file server. In the first case, the file server is
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responsible for opening and closing the block device, and recovery from a
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driver restart involves reopening those minor devices. Regular file systems
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should have one or at most two (for a separate journal) block devices open at
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the same time, which is why NR_OPEN_DEVS is set to a value that is quite low.
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In the second case, VFS is responsible for opening and closing the block device
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(and performing IOCTLs), as well as reopening the block device on a driver
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restart -- the root file server only gets raw I/O (and flush) requests.
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At this time, libbdev considers only clean crashes (a crash-only model), and
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does not support recovery from behavioral errors. Protocol errors are passed to
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the user process, and generally do not have an effect on the overall state of
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the library.
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RETRY MODEL
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The philosophy for recovering from driver restarts in libbdev can be formulated
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as follows: we want to tolerate an unlimited number of driver restarts over a
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long time, but we do not want to keep retrying individual requests across
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driver restarts. As such, we do not keep track of driver restarts on a per-
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driver basis, because that would mean we put a hard limit on the number of
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restarts for that driver in total. Instead, there are two limits: a driver
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restart limit that is kept on a per-request basis, failing only that request
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when the limit is reached, and a driver restart limit that is kept during
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recovery, limiting the number of restarts and eventually giving up on the
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entire driver when even the recovery keeps failing (as no progress is made in
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that case).
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Each transfer request also has a transfer retry count. The assumption here is
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that when a transfer request returns EIO, it can be retried and possibly
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succeed upon repetition. The driver restart and transfer retry counts are
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tracked independently and thus the first to hit the limit will fail the
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request. The behavior should be the same for synchronous and asynchronous
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requests in this respect.
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It could happen that a new driver gets loaded after we have decided that the
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current driver is unusable. This could be due to a race condition (VFS sends a
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new-driver request after we've given up) or due to user interaction (the user
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loads a replacement driver). The latter case may occur legitimately with raw
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I/O on the root file server, so we must not mark the driver as unusable
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forever. On the other hand, in the former case, we must not continue to send
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I/O without first reopening the minor devices. For this reason, we do not clean
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up the record of the minor devices when we mark a driver as unusable.
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