linux-ext4 - Re: [PATCH] extend e2fsprogs functionality to add EXT2_FLAG

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Date:	Tue, 12 Jan 2010 08:29:50 -0500
From:	Ric Wheeler <rwheeler@...hat.com>
To:	Michal Novotny <minovotn@...hat.com>
CC:	Christoph Hellwig <hch@...radead.org>, linux-ext4@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: [PATCH] extend e2fsprogs functionality to add EXT2_FLAG_DIRECT
 option

On 01/12/2010 08:23 AM, Michal Novotny wrote:
> On 01/12/2010 02:12 PM, Michal Novotny wrote:
>> On 01/12/2010 02:04 PM, Ric Wheeler wrote:
>>> On 01/12/2010 08:01 AM, Michal Novotny wrote:
>>>> On 01/12/2010 01:46 PM, Christoph Hellwig wrote:
>>>>> On Tue, Jan 12, 2010 at 01:30:40PM +0100, Michal Novotny wrote:
>>>>>> Not really, pygrub doesn't do any manipulation with file system and
>>>>>> also, it's not working on a life file system. It's called before the
>>>>>> guest boots up to read information about grub.conf/initrd and
>>>>>> kernel for
>>>>>> PV guest and after this is read and selected in pygrub then the
>>>>>> guest is
>>>>>> booted using the kernel and initrd extracted from the image (after
>>>>>> which
>>>>>> the file is closed). Once again, nothing uses write support and it
>>>>>> was
>>>>>> added just to make it use O_DIRECT for both read and write operations
>>>>>> but only pygrub uses only read support and O_DIRECT passed here is
>>>>>> the
>>>>>> only way to make it use non-cached data.
>>>>> So what caches get in the way? From the above it seems the situation
>>>>> is the following:
>>>>>
>>>>> - filesystem N is a guest filesystem. It's not usually mounted on the
>>>>> host, except for initial setup long time ago
>>>>
>>>> Yes, it is really a guest file system. This is not mounted in the host
>>>> and the reason is to get actual version of grub.conf, initrd and kernel
>>>> to be booted...
>>>>
>>>>> - before booting a guest your "pygrub" tools needs to read files on
>>>>> it, and it's doing so using e2fsprogs
>>>>
>>>> Correct.
>>>>
>>>>> - once the guest is life it uses the extN kernel driver to access the
>>>>> filesystem
>>>>
>>>> That's right. So this is no longer pygrub responsibility...
>>>>
>>>>> nowhere in this cycle you should have any stale cached data. The
>>>>> kernel
>>>>> always makes sure to write back data on umount/reboot, as does
>>>>> e2fsprogs
>>>>> if actually used to write data (which you said is not the case
>>>>> anyway).
>>>>
>>>> In fact I was unable to run into those problems myself but
>>>> reporter/customer did.
>>>>
>>>>> The only data that may be in the cache are unmodified data from reads
>>>>> on the block device from either e2fsprogs or a suboptimal virtual
>>>>> block
>>>>> device implementation, but these can't cause any problems.
>>>> Michal
>>>
>>> If the guest is the only one (when running) that installs a new
>>> grub.conf file and kernel and it shuts down properly, you should be
>>> good. It if does not shut down cleanly, it could have a stale
>>> grub.conf file (or worse, a partially written one), but using
>>> O_DIRECT to bypass the file system cache should not help.
>>>
>>> If we cannot reproduce this failure, sounds like we need to go back
>>> and get a better understanding of what the customer saw?
>>>
>>> ric
>>>
>> That's right. I am going write an e-mail regarding this information to
>> the reproducer if this bug and tell him that I need more information
>> about what's happening at the customer side.
>>
> One more thing to point out, let's have a look at:
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=466681#c15 .This is about
> workaround to drop caches to be added to pygrub in the host machine
> using this command:
>
> echo 1> /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
>
> So this really looks like the caching issue if it's working fine after
> dropping the caches. That may be the reason why this could be fine with
> this patch present in e2fsprogs.
>
> Michal

That BZ has a pretty long and twisted history, but after a quick read, I still 
don't see why a cleanly shutdown guest would have issues with caching that using 
O_DIRECT on read would help.

We will need to dig into a bit more...

ric

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