It turns out that 'zpool events' over 1024 bytes in size where being
silently dropped. This was discovered while writing the zfault.sh
tests to validate common failure modes.
This could occur because the zfs interface for passing an arbitrary
size nvlist_t over an ioctl() is to provide a buffer for the packed
nvlist which is usually big enough. In this case 1024 byte is the
default. If the kernel determines the buffer is to small it returns
ENOMEM and the minimum required size of the nvlist_t. This was
working properly but in the case of 'zpool events' the event stream
was advanced dispite the error. Thus the retry with the bigger
buffer would succeed but it would skip over the previous event.
The fix is to pass this size to zfs_zevent_next() and determine
before removing the event from the list if it will fit. This was
preferable to checking after the event was returned because this
avoids the need to rewind the stream.
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