[dm-devel] Bcache upstreaming

[Mike Snitzer]

On Thu, Jan 31 2013 at  7:33pm -0500,
Kent Overstreet <koverstreet at google.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 06:08:00PM -0500, Mike Snitzer wrote:
> > On Thu, Jan 31 2013 at  5:25pm -0500,
> > Kent Overstreet <kent.overstreet at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > > On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 2:17 PM, Mike Snitzer <snitzer at redhat.com> wrote:
> > > > Ah, yeah I had a typo in my script.  When I fixed it I get a BUG (with
> > > > your latest bcache code) when I try to mkfs.xfs /dev/bcache0:
> > > 
> > > Heh, that's the dev branch - you don't want to be running the dev
> > > branch, there's a lot of buggy crap in there and it almost definitely
> > > corrupts data. Testing branch should be good, though.
> > 
> > OK, I'll pick up changes from -testing until directed elsewhere.
> > 
> > BTW, here are couple things I've noticed with bcache:
> > 
> > - The log messages seem to have an extra newline at the end.
> 
> How are you seeing that/which log messages? I hadn't noticed that
> myself (do they not get printed somehow?)

I'm just seeing extra newlines (empty lines), e.g.:
bcache: run_cache_set() invalidating existing data

bcache: bch_cached_dev_attach() Caching dm-4 as bcache1 on set 5c0ba0d0-df36-4684-acc5-45f5b4683788

bcache: register_cache() registered cache device dm-3

EXT4-fs (bcache1): mounted filesystem with ordered data mode. Opts: discard

> > - bcache doesn't appear to be establishing proper holders on the devices
> >   it uses for the backing and cache devices.
> >   - lsblk doesn't show any associations with bcache devices.
> 
> How's that created - what function am I looking for?

bd_link_disk_holder and bd_unlink_disk_holder

> >   - the fio utility isn't able to get any stats for the bcache device or
> >     the devices bcache uses.
> 
> I'd been meaning to fix that, never got around to figuring out how those
> stats are generated. Function/file you can point me to?

I think you'll get the stats for via genhd (add_disk) -- the stats are
the 'disk_stats dkstats' member of the genhd's hd_struct.  But as of
now you'll notice that /sys/block/bcacheX/stat only ever contains 0s.

part_stat_inc, part_stat_add are the low-level methods for driving the
counters up.  But I'm not sure why bcache isn't getting these stats  --
disk stats are something we get for free with DM devices so I haven't
really had to dig into these mechanics in detail.

> > - if I 'stop' a bcache device (using sysfs) while it is mounted; once I
> >   unmount the filesystem the device that bcache was using as a cache
> >   still has an open count of 1 but the bcache device then no longer
> >   exists
> 
> You mean the backing device isn't open, just the cache device?
>
> That's intended behaviour, backing and cache devices have separate
> lifetimes (and you can attach many backing devices to a single cache).
> 
> You just have to stop the cache set separately, via
> /sys/fs/bcache/<uuid>/stop or /sys/block/<cache device>/bcache/set/stop

The /dev/bcacheX device was mounted.  I issued 1 to
/sys/block/#{bcache_name}/bcache/stop before unmounting.  I then
unmounted /dev/bcacheX, the remaining bcache device infrastructure was
torn down.  But after that the device that was the cache device was
still held open -- seems like a reference leaked.