[dm-devel] [PATCH] multipathd: check and cleanup zombie paths

[Bart Van Assche]

On Tue, 2018-03-20 at 16:12 +0100, Xose Vazquez Perez wrote:
> On 03/20/2018 03:58 PM, Bart Van Assche wrote:
> 
> > It is on purpose that the SCSI core does not remove stale SCSI device nodes.
> > If you want that these stale SCSI device nodes get removed automatically,
> > two possible approaches are (there might be other approaches):
> > * Write a new user space daemon that periodically checks for stale devices
> >   (e.g. by running grep -aH . /sys/class/scsi_device/*/*/state |
> >    grep -v running) and that triggers a SCSI rescan if any stale devices are
> >   found.
> > * Write a udev rule that listens for SDEV_UA=REPORTED_LUNS_DATA_HAS_CHANGED
> >   and that triggers a SCSI rescan if this event is triggered by the kernel.
> 
> There are some "remove" flags in rescan-scsi-bus.sh:
> https://github.com/hreinecke/sg3_utils/blob/d4dbbede04db21c206e4c2acc1cf766117f003c3/scripts/rescan-scsi-bus.sh#L1080
> 
> -r      enables removing of devices        [default: disabled]
> --forceremove:   Remove stale devices (DANGEROUS)
> --forcerescan:   Remove and readd existing devices (DANGEROUS)

Last time I checked the rescan-scsi-bus.sh script relied on the SCSI sysfs
delete attribute to remove stale devices. That is the mechanism that can
trigger a deadlock in the kernel.

Bart.