[linux-lvm] Discussion: performance issue on event activation mode

[Peter Rajnoha]

On 9/30/21 10:07, heming.zhao at suse.com wrote:
> On 9/30/21 3:51 PM, Martin Wilck wrote:
>> On Thu, 2021-09-30 at 00:06 +0200, Peter Rajnoha wrote:
>>> On Tue 28 Sep 2021 12:42, Benjamin Marzinski wrote:
>>>> On Tue, Sep 28, 2021 at 03:16:08PM +0000, Martin Wilck wrote:
>>>>> I have pondered this quite a bit, but I can't say I have a
>>>>> concrete
>>>>> plan.
>>>>>
>>>>> To avoid depending on "udev settle", multipathd needs to
>>>>> partially
>>>>> revert to udev-independent device detection. At least during
>>>>> initial
>>>>> startup, we may encounter multipath maps with members that don't
>>>>> exist
>>>>> in the udev db, and we need to deal with this situation
>>>>> gracefully. We
>>>>> currently don't, and it's a tough problem to solve cleanly. Not
>>>>> relying
>>>>> on udev opens up a Pandora's box wrt WWID determination, for
>>>>> example.
>>>>> Any such change would without doubt carry a large risk of
>>>>> regressions
>>>>> in some scenarios, which we wouldn't want to happen in our large
>>>>> customer's data centers.
>>>>
>>>> I'm not actually sure that it's as bad as all that. We just may
>>>> need a
>>>> way for multipathd to detect if the coldplug has happened.  I'm
>>>> sure if
>>>> we say we need it to remove the udev settle, we can get some method
>>>> to
>>>> check this. Perhaps there is one already, that I don't know about.
>>>> If
>>>
>>> The coldplug events are synthesized and as such, they all now contain
>>> SYNTH_UUID=<UUID> key-value pair with kernel>=4.13:
>>>
>>> https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-uevent 
>>>
>>>
>>> I've already tried to proposee a patch for systemd/udev that would
>>> mark
>>> all uevents coming from the trigger (including the one used at boot
>>> for
>>> coldplug) with an extra key-value pair that we could easily match in
>>> rules,
>>> but that was not accepted. So right now, we could detect that
>>> synthesized uevent happened, though we can't be sure it was the
>>> actual
>>> udev trigger at boot. For that, we'd need the extra marks. I can give
>>> it
>>> another try though, maybe if there are more people asking for this
>>> functionality, we'll be at better position for this to be accepted.
>>
>> That would allow us to discern synthetic events, but I'm unsure how
>> this what help us. Here, what matters is to figure out when we don't
>> expect any more of them to arrive.
>>
>> I guess it would be possible to compare the list of (interesting)
>> devices in sysfs with the list of devices in the udev db. For
>> multipathd, we could
>>
>>   - scan set U of udev devices on startup
>>   - scan set S of sysfs devices on startup
>>   - listen for uevents for updating both S and U
>>   - after each uevent, check if the difference set of S and U is emtpy
>>   - if yes, coldplug has finished
>>   - otherwise, continue waiting, possibly until some timeout expires.
>>
>> It's more difficult for LVM because you have no daemon maintaining
>> state.
>>
> 
> Another performance story:
> The legacy lvm2 (2.02.xx) with lvmetad daemon, the event-activation mode
> is very likely timeout on a large scale PVs.
> When customer met this issue, we suggested them to disable lvmetad.

We've already dumped lvmetad. Has this also been an issue with lvm versions 
without lvmetad, but still using the event-activation mode? (...the lvm 
versions where instead of lvmetad, we use the helper files under /run/lvm to 
track the state of incoming PVs and VG completeness)

Also, when I tried bootup with over 1000 devices in place (though in a VM, I 
don't have access to real machine with so many devices), I've noticed a 
performance regression in libudev itself with the interface to enumerate 
devices (which is the default obtain_device_list_from_udev=1 in lvm.conf):
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1986158

It's very important to measure what's exactly causing the delays. And also 
important how we measure it - I'm not that trustful to systemd-analyze blame 
as it's very misty of what it is actually measuring.

I just want to say that some of the issues might simply be regressions/issues 
with systemd/udev that could be fixed. We as providers of block device 
abstractions where we need to handle, sometimes, thousands of devices, might 
be the first ones to hit these issues.

-- 
Peter