[dm-devel] dm-cache coherence issue

[Mike Snitzer]

On Mon, Jun 26 2017 at  3:08pm -0400,
Johannes Bauer <dfnsonfsduifb at gmx.de> wrote:

> Hi Joe,
> 
> On 26.06.2017 17:58, Joe Thornber wrote:
> > On Mon, Jun 26, 2017 at 12:33:42PM +0100, Joe Thornber wrote:
> >> On Sat, Jun 24, 2017 at 03:56:54PM +0200, Johannes Bauer wrote:
> >>> So I seem to have a very basic misunderstanding of what the cleaner
> >>> policy/dirty pages mean. Is there a way to force the cache to flush
> >>> entirely? Apparently, "dmsetup wait" and/or "sync" don't do the job.
> >>
> >> I'll try and reproduce your scenario and get back to you.
> > 
> > Here's a similar scenario that I've added to the dm test suite:
> > 
> > https://github.com/jthornber/device-mapper-test-suite/commit/457e889b0c4d510609c0d7464af07f2ebee20768
> > 
> > It goes through all the steps you need to use to decommission a cache
> > with dirty blocks.  Namely:
> > 
> > - switch to writethrough mode (so new io can't create new dirty blocks)
> > - switch to the cleaner policy
> > - wait for clean
> > - remove the cache device before accessing the origin directly
> 
> Interesting, I did *not* change to writethrough. However, there
> shouldn't have been any I/O on the device (it was not accessed by
> anything after I switched to the cleaner policy).
> 
> On the advice of Zdenek Kabelac, who messaged me off-list, I therefore
> have indeed been convinced that using dm-cache "by hand" maybe is too
> dangerous (i.e., I had not accounted for "repairing" of a cache and am
> really still unsure what LVM does that) and that lvmcache is a better
> choice -- even though Ubuntu supports it really crappily for root devices:
> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/lvm2/+bug/1423796 a shame,
> it's been like this for over two years.
> 
> Anyways, I'll try to replicate my scenario again because I'm actually
> quite sure that I did everything correctly (I did it a few times).

Except you didn't first switch to writethrough -- which is _not_
correct.