Re: [PATCH] xfs: remove "no-allocation" reservations for file creations
From: Darrick J. Wong <hidden>
Date: 2017-08-24 00:57:44
On Thu, Aug 24, 2017 at 10:47:55AM +1000, Dave Chinner wrote:
On Wed, Aug 23, 2017 at 01:22:13PM -0700, Darrick J. Wong wrote:quoted
On Mon, Aug 21, 2017 at 10:24:04AM +0200, Christoph Hellwig wrote:quoted
If we create a new file we will need an inode, and usually some metadata in the parent direction. Aiming for everything to go well despite the lack of a reservation leads to dirty transactions cancelled under a heavy create/delete load. This patch removes those nospace transactions, which will lead to slightly earlier ENOSPC on some workloads, but instead prevent file system shutdowns due to cancelling dirty transactions for others. A customer could observe assertations failures and shutdowns due to cancelation of dirty transactions during heavy NFS workloads as shown below:Looks ok... but is there a xfstest somewhere that can be coaxed into reproducing this? I'm looking at what this code does and have been wondering why it even tries this weird workaround in the first place?Because back in 1997 SGI had a customer that didn't like getting ENOSPC being reported trying to rename file near ENOSPC when df said the filesystem had <some tiny amount> of space available and the directory blocks weren't full: commit f5029ed542697e8daf728b57d8fec0d9f1abc66c Author: Doug Doucette [off-list ref] Date: Tue Jul 15 17:54:13 1997 +0000 Add xfs_dir_canenter to check for entering name in a directory with no space allocation. Initialize new da_arg field justcheck, use it in xfs_dir_node_addname. commit 9b9c81137b07d40d864e468cf3168f1b55d83c13 Author: Doug Doucette [off-list ref] Date: Fri Jul 11 16:33:02 1997 +0000 Make xfs_dir_createname fail gracefully if the total argument is 0 and we actually need space. Same treatment for xfs_dir_node_addname. Part of making rename work sometimes with 0 space reservation.quoted
IOWS, the weirdness removed by this patch didn't quite smell right, but at the same time I want to know more about why the smelly weirdness was there at all before I rip it out. Context, anyone? :)It's always been a crufty corner case. xfs_rename and xfs_remove need to be able to operate at ENOSPC where reservations may not be possible so they can free up space. However, create/symlink/link don't really need to work when so close to ENOSPC we can't get a reservation of a few blocks, so I don't see a huge problem with this.
<nod> I agree that for rm and rename we might have to do twisted things to avoid blowing up; it was more that doing so for inode allocation as part of create/symlink that just seemed ... weird to me. --D
Cheers, Dave. -- Dave Chinner david@fromorbit.com -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-xfs" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html