Re: [RFD] diskfilter stale RAID member detection vs. lazy scanning

[Andrei Borzenkov]

16.07.2015 00:47, Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko пишет:
> On 15.07.2015 20:05, Vladimir 'φ-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko wrote:
>> On 28.06.2015 20:06, Andrei Borzenkov wrote:
>>> I was looking at implementing detection of outdated RAID members.
>>> Unfortunately it appears to be fundamentally incompatible with lazy
>>> scanning as implemented currently by GRUB. We simply cannot stop
>>> scanning for other copies of metadata once "enough" was seen. Because
>>> any other disk may contain more actual copy which invalidates
>>> everything seen up to this point.
>>>
>>> So basically either we officially admit that GRUB is not able to detect
>>> stale members or we drop lazy scanning.
>>>
>>> Comments, ideas?
>>>
>> We don't need to see all disks to decide that there is no staleness. If
>> you have an array with N devices and you can lose at most K of them,
>> then you can check for staleness after you have seen max(K+1, N-K)
>> drives. Why?
>>
>> Let those disks have generation numbers g_0,...,g_{N-1}. Our goal is to
>> find the largest number G s.t. number of indices with
>> g_i >= G is at least N-K.
>> In most common case when you have seen K+1 disks all of them will have
>> the same generation number
>> g_0=g_1=...=g_{K}
>> Then we know that
>> G<=g_0
>> Suppose not then all of 0,...,K are stale and we have lost K+1 drives
>> which contradicts our goal.
>> On the other hand when we have seen N-K devices we know that
>> G>=min(g_0,...,g_{N-K-1})
>> as with G=min(g_0,...,g_{N-K-1}) we already have N-K disks.
>>
>> In cases other than mirror usually K+1<=N-K and so we don't even need to
>> scan for more disks to detect staleness.
>> The code will be slightly tricky as it has to handle tolerating
>> staleness if there are too little disks but it's totally feasible. Let
>> me figure out the rest of math and write a prototype.
> Untested patch implementing these ideas, just to illustrate

I am not sure about insert_array(). Let's consider raid1 which lost one
member which was replaced by hot spare and was left in a system. So we
now have three disks

A(G) A(G+1) B(G+1)

First we see A(G+1) and insert it in array. Later we see A(G). If I
follow code in insert_array(), we simply overwrite previous disk
reference without checking. So we have leaked open file but what's worse
we lost reference to the actual member.

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