For a long time now the kernel has been moving away from using the
pdflush daemon to write 'old' dirty pages to disk. The primary reason
for this is because the pdflush daemon is single threaded and can be
a limiting factor for performance. Since pdflush sequentially walks
the dirty inode list for each super block any delay in processing can
slow down dirty page writeback for all filesystems.
The replacement for pdflush is called bdi (backing device info). The
bdi system involves creating a per-filesystem control structure each
with its own private sets of queues to manage writeback. The advantage
is greater parallelism which improves performance and prevents a single
filesystem from slowing writeback to the others.
For a long time both systems co-existed in the kernel so it wasn't
strictly required to implement the bdi scheme. However, as of
Linux 2.6.36 kernels the pdflush functionality has been retired.
Since ZFS already bypasses the page cache for most I/O this is only
an issue for mmap(2) writes which must go through the page cache.
Even then adding this missing support for newer kernels was overlooked
because there are other mechanisms which can trigger writeback.
However, there is one critical case where not implementing the bdi
functionality can cause problems. If an application handles a page
fault it can enter the balance_dirty_pages() callpath. This will
result in the application hanging until the number of dirty pages in
the system drops below the dirty ratio.
Without a registered backing_device_info for the filesystem the
dirty pages will not get written out. Thus the application will hang.
As mentioned above this was less of an issue with older kernels because
pdflush would eventually write out the dirty pages.
This change adds a backing_device_info structure to the zfs_sb_t
which is already allocated per-super block. It is then registered
when the filesystem mounted and unregistered on unmount. It will
not be registered for mounted snapshots which are read-only. This
change will result in flush-<pool> thread being dynamically created
and destroyed per-mounted filesystem for writeback.
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
Closes#174
Unlike most other Linux distributions archlinux installs its
init scripts in /etc/rc.d insead of /etc/init.d. This commit
provides an archlinux rc.d script for zfs and extends the
build infrastructure to ensure it get's installed in the
correct place.
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
Closes#322
The .get_sb callback has been replaced by a .mount callback
in the file_system_type structure. When using the new
interface the caller must now use the mount_nodev() helper.
Unfortunately, the new interface no longer passes the vfsmount
down to the zfs layers. This poses a problem for the existing
implementation because we currently save this pointer in the
super block for latter use. It provides our only entry point
in to the namespace layer for manipulating certain mount options.
This needed to be done originally to allow commands like
'zfs set atime=off tank' to work properly. It also allowed me
to keep more of the original Solaris code unmodified. Under
Solaris there is a 1-to-1 mapping between a mount point and a
file system so this is a fairly natural thing to do. However,
under Linux they many be multiple entries in the namespace
which reference the same filesystem. Thus keeping a back
reference from the filesystem to the namespace is complicated.
Rather than introduce some ugly hack to get the vfsmount and
continue as before. I'm leveraging this API change to update
the ZFS code to do things in a more natural way for Linux.
This has the upside that is resolves the compatibility issue
for the long term and fixes several other minor bugs which
have been reported.
This commit updates the code to remove this vfsmount back
reference entirely. All modifications to filesystem mount
options are now passed in to the kernel via a '-o remount'.
This is the expected Linux mechanism and allows the namespace
to properly handle any options which apply to it before passing
them on to the file system itself.
Aside from fixing the compatibility issue, removing the
vfsmount has had the benefit of simplifying the code. This
change which fairly involved has turned out nicely.
Closes#246Closes#217Closes#187Closes#248Closes#231
The security_inode_init_security() function now takes an additional
qstr argument which must be passed in from the dentry if available.
Passing a NULL is safe when no qstr is available the relevant
security checks will just be skipped.
Closes#246Closes#217Closes#187
The inode eviction should unmap the pages associated with the inode.
These pages should also be flushed to disk to avoid the data loss.
Therefore, use truncate_setsize() in evict_inode() to release the
pagecache.
The API truncate_setsize() was added in 2.6.35 kernel. To ensure
compatibility with the old kernel, the patch defines its own
truncate_setsize function.
Signed-off-by: Prasad Joshi <pjoshi@stec-inc.com>
Closes#255
Update udev helper scripts to deal with device-mapper devices created
by multipathd. These enhancements are targeted at a particular
storage network topology under evaluation at LLNL consisting of two
SAS switches providing redundant connectivity between multiple server
nodes and disk enclosures.
The key to making these systems manageable is to create shortnames for
each disk that conveys its physical location in a drawer. In a
direct-attached topology we infer a disk's enclosure from the PCI bus
number and HBA port number in the by-path name provided by udev. In a
switched topology, however, multiple drawers are accessed via a single
HBA port. We therefore resort to assigning drawer identifiers based
on which switch port a drive's enclosure is connected to. This
information is available from sysfs.
Add options to zpool_layout to generate an /etc/zfs/zdev.conf using
symbolic links in /dev/disk/by-id of the form
<label>-<UUID>-switch-port:<X>-slot:<Y>. <label> is a string that
depends on the subsystem that created the link and defaults to
"dm-uuid-mpath" (this prefix is used by multipathd). <UUID> is a
unique identifier for the disk typically obtained from the scsi_id
program, and <X> and <Y> denote the switch port and disk slot numbers,
respectively.
Add a callout script sas_switch_id for use by multipathd to help
create symlinks of the form described above. Update zpool_id and the
udev zpool rules file to handle both multipath devices and
conventional drives.
Brian Behlendorf
Kyle Fuller
Prasad Joshi
Ned A. Bass