Eleven new zpool configurations were added to allow testing of various
failure cases. The first 5 zpool configurations leverage the 'faulty'
md device type which allow us to simuluate IO errors at the block layer.
The last 6 zpool configurations leverage the scsi_debug module provided
by modern kernels. This device allows you to create virtual scsi
devices which are backed by a ram disk. With this setup we can verify
the full IO stack by injecting faults at the lowest layer. Both methods
of fault injection are important to verifying the IO stack.
The zfs code itself also provides a mechanism for error injection
via the zinject command line tool. While we should also take advantage
of this appraoch to validate the code it does not address any of the
Linux integration issues which are the most concerning. For the
moment we're trusting that the upstream Solaris guys are running
zinject and would have caught internal zfs logic errors.
Currently, there are 6 r/w test cases layered on top of the 'faulty'
md devices. They include 3 writes tests for soft/transient errors,
hard/permenant errors, and all writes error to the device. There
are 3 matching read tests for soft/transient errors, hard/permenant
errors, and fixable read error with a write. Although for this last
case zfs doesn't do anything special.
The seventh test case verifies zfs detects and corrects checksum
errors. In this case one of the drives is extensively damaged and
by dd'ing over large sections of it. We then ensure zfs logs the
issue and correctly rebuilds the damage.
The next test cases use the scsi_debug configuration to injects error
at the bottom of the scsi stack. This ensures we find any flaws in the
scsi midlayer or our usage of it. Plus it stresses the device specific
retry, timeout, and error handling outside of zfs's control.
The eighth test case is to verify that the system correctly handles an
intermittent device timeout. Here the scsi_debug device drops 1 in N
requests resulting in a retry either at the block level. The ZFS code
does specify the FAILFAST option but it turns out that for this case
the Linux IO stack with still retry the command. The FAILFAST logic
located in scsi_noretry_cmd() does no seem to apply to the simply
timeout case. It appears to be more targeted to specific device or
transport errors from the lower layers.
The ninth test case handles a persistent failure in which the device
is removed from the system by Linux. The test verifies that the failure
is detected, the device is made unavailable, and then can be successfully
re-add when brought back online. Additionally, it ensures that errors
and events are logged to the correct places and the no data corruption
has occured due to the failure.
ZFS works best when it is notified as soon as possible when a device
failure occurs. This allows it to immediately start any recovery
actions which may be needed. In theory Linux supports a flag which
can be set on bio's called FAILFAST which provides this quick
notification by disabling the retry logic in the lower scsi layers.
That's the theory at least. In practice is turns out that while the
flag exists you oddly have to set it with the BIO_RW_AHEAD flag.
And even when it's set it you may get retries in the low level
drivers decides that's the right behavior, or if you don't get the
right error codes reported to the scsi midlayer.
Unfortunately, without additional kernels patchs there's not much
which can be done to improve this. Basically, this just means that
it may take 2-3 minutes before a ZFS is notified properly that a
device has failed. This can be improved and I suspect I'll be
submitting patches upstream to handle this.
One of the neat tricks an autoconf style project is capable of
is allow configurion/building in a directory other than the
source directory. The major advantage to this is that you can
build the project various different ways while making changes
in a single source tree.
For example, this project is designed to work on various different
Linux distributions each of which work slightly differently. This
means that changes need to verified on each of those supported
distributions perferably before the change is committed to the
public git repo.
Using nfs and custom build directories makes this much easier.
I now have a single source tree in nfs mounted on several different
systems each running a supported distribution. When I make a
change to the source base I suspect may break things I can
concurrently build from the same source on all the systems each
in their own subdirectory.
wget -c http://github.com/downloads/behlendorf/zfs/zfs-x.y.z.tar.gz
tar -xzf zfs-x.y.z.tar.gz
cd zfs-x-y-z
------------------------- run concurrently ----------------------
<ubuntu system> <fedora system> <debian system> <rhel6 system>
mkdir ubuntu mkdir fedora mkdir debian mkdir rhel6
cd ubuntu cd fedora cd debian cd rhel6
../configure ../configure ../configure ../configure
make make make make
make check make check make check make check
This change also moves many of the include headers from individual
incude/sys directories under the modules directory in to a single
top level include directory. This has the advantage of making
the build rules cleaner and logically it makes a bit more sense.
Brian Behlendorf