[dm-devel] [PATCH 2/2] md/raid0: Do not bypass blocking queue entered for raid0 bios

[Guilherme G. Piccoli]

On 5/8/19 6:29 AM, Wols Lists wrote:
> On 06/05/19 22:07, Song Liu wrote:
>> Could you please run a quick test with raid5? I am wondering whether
>> some race condition could get us into similar crash. If we cannot easily
>> trigger the bug, we can process with this version.
> 
> Bear in mind I just read the list and write documentation, but ...
> 
> My gut feeling is that if it can theoretically happen for all raid
> modes, it should be fixed for all raid modes. What happens if code
> changes elsewhere and suddenly it really does happen for say raid-5?
> 
> On the other hand, if fixing it in md.c only gets tested for raid-0, how
> do we know it will actually work for other raids if they do suddenly
> start falling through.

Hi, I understand your concern. But all other raid levels contains 
failure-event mechanisms. For example, in all my tests with raid5 or 
raid1, it first complained the device was removed, then it failed in 
super_written() when no other available device was present.
On the other hand, raid0 does "blind-writes": it just selects the device 
in which that bio should be written (given the stripe math) and change 
the bio's device, sending it back via generic_make_request(). It's 
dummy, but not in a bad way, but rather for performance reasons. It has 
no "intelligence" for failures, as all other raid levels.

That said, we could fix md.c for all raid levels, but I personally think 
it's a bazooka shot, only raid0 shows consistently this issue.

> 
> Academic purity versus engineering practicality :-)

Heheh you have good points here! Thanks for the input =)
Cheers,


Guilherme


> 
> Cheers,
> Wol
>