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authorDave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com>2013-10-15 02:17:49 +0400
committerBen Myers <bpm@sgi.com>2013-10-17 19:56:17 +0400
commit2c6e24ce1aa6b3b147c75d488c2797ee258eb22b (patch)
tree5aa3cc69daf8a5562b693b8094d835e7cb507fd1 /fs/xfs/xfs_log_priv.h
parent74564fb48cbfcb5b433c1baec1f3158ea638b203 (diff)
downloadlinux-2c6e24ce1aa6b3b147c75d488c2797ee258eb22b.tar.xz
xfs: prevent deadlock trying to cover an active log
Recent analysis of a deadlocked XFS filesystem from a kernel crash dump indicated that the filesystem was stuck waiting for log space. The short story of the hang on the RHEL6 kernel is this: - the tail of the log is pinned by an inode - the inode has been pushed by the xfsaild - the inode has been flushed to it's backing buffer and is currently flush locked and hence waiting for backing buffer IO to complete and remove it from the AIL - the backing buffer is marked for write - it is on the delayed write queue - the inode buffer has been modified directly and logged recently due to unlinked inode list modification - the backing buffer is pinned in memory as it is in the active CIL context. - the xfsbufd won't start buffer writeback because it is pinned - xfssyncd won't force the log because it sees the log as needing to be covered and hence wants to issue a dummy transaction to move the log covering state machine along. Hence there is no trigger to force the CIL to the log and hence unpin the inode buffer and therefore complete the inode IO, remove it from the AIL and hence move the tail of the log along, allowing transactions to start again. Mainline kernels also have the same deadlock, though the signature is slightly different - the inode buffer never reaches the delayed write lists because xfs_buf_item_push() sees that it is pinned and hence never adds it to the delayed write list that the xfsaild flushes. There are two possible solutions here. The first is to simply force the log before trying to cover the log and so ensure that the CIL is emptied before we try to reserve space for the dummy transaction in the xfs_log_worker(). While this might work most of the time, it is still racy and is no guarantee that we don't get stuck in xfs_trans_reserve waiting for log space to come free. Hence it's not the best way to solve the problem. The second solution is to modify xfs_log_need_covered() to be aware of the CIL. We only should be attempting to cover the log if there is no current activity in the log - covering the log is the process of ensuring that the head and tail in the log on disk are identical (i.e. the log is clean and at idle). Hence, by definition, if there are items in the CIL then the log is not at idle and so we don't need to attempt to cover it. When we don't need to cover the log because it is active or idle, we issue a log force from xfs_log_worker() - if the log is idle, then this does nothing. However, if the log is active due to there being items in the CIL, it will force the items in the CIL to the log and unpin them. In the case of the above deadlock scenario, instead of xfs_log_worker() getting stuck in xfs_trans_reserve() attempting to cover the log, it will instead force the log, thereby unpinning the inode buffer, allowing IO to be issued and complete and hence removing the inode that was pinning the tail of the log from the AIL. At that point, everything will start moving along again. i.e. the xfs_log_worker turns back into a watchdog that can alleviate deadlocks based around pinned items that prevent the tail of the log from being moved... Signed-off-by: Dave Chinner <dchinner@redhat.com> Reviewed-by: Eric Sandeen <sandeen@redhat.com> Signed-off-by: Ben Myers <bpm@sgi.com>
Diffstat (limited to 'fs/xfs/xfs_log_priv.h')
-rw-r--r--fs/xfs/xfs_log_priv.h10
1 files changed, 4 insertions, 6 deletions
diff --git a/fs/xfs/xfs_log_priv.h b/fs/xfs/xfs_log_priv.h
index 136654b9400d..f80cff26fda9 100644
--- a/fs/xfs/xfs_log_priv.h
+++ b/fs/xfs/xfs_log_priv.h
@@ -514,12 +514,10 @@ xlog_assign_grant_head(atomic64_t *head, int cycle, int space)
/*
* Committed Item List interfaces
*/
-int
-xlog_cil_init(struct xlog *log);
-void
-xlog_cil_init_post_recovery(struct xlog *log);
-void
-xlog_cil_destroy(struct xlog *log);
+int xlog_cil_init(struct xlog *log);
+void xlog_cil_init_post_recovery(struct xlog *log);
+void xlog_cil_destroy(struct xlog *log);
+bool xlog_cil_empty(struct xlog *log);
/*
* CIL force routines