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SubjectRe: Data corruption on software RAID
> > Possibilities how to fix it:
> >
> > 1. lock the buffers and pages while they are being written --- this would
> > cause performance degradation (the most severe degradation would be in case
> > when one process does repeatedly sync() and other unrelated process
> > repeatedly writes to some file).
> >
> > Lock the buffers and pages only for RAID --- would create many special cases
> > and possible bugs.
> >
> > 2. never turn the region dirty bit off until the filesystem is unmounted.
> > --- this is the simplest fix. If the computer crashes after a long time, it
> > resynchronizes the whole device. But there won't cause application-visible
> > or filesystem-visible data corruption.
> >
> > 3. turn off the region bit if the region wasn't written in one pdflush
> > period --- requires an interaction with pdflush, rather complex. The problem
> > here is that pdflush makes its best effort to write data in
> > dirty_writeback_centisecs interval, but it is not guaranteed to do it.
> >
> > 4. make more region states: Region has in-memory states CLEAN, DIRTY,
> > MAYBE_DIRTY, CLEAN_CANDIDATE.
> >
> > When you start writing to the region, it is always moved to DIRTY state (and
> > on-disk bit is turned on).
> >
> > When you finish all writes to the region, move it to MAYBE_DIRTY state, but
> > leave bit on disk on. We now don't know if the region is dirty or no.
> >
> > Run a helper thread that does periodically:
> > Change MAYBE_DIRTY regions to CLEAN_CANDIDATE
> > Issue sync()
> > Change CLEAN_CANDIDATE regions to CLEAN state and clear their on-disk bit.
> >
> > The rationale is that if the above write-while-modify scenario happens, the
> > page is always dirty. Thus, sync() will write the page, kick the region back
> > from CLEAN_CANDIDATE to MAYBE_DIRTY state and we won't mark the region as
> > clean on disk.
> >
> >
> > I'd like to know you ideas on this, before we start coding a solution.
> >
>
> I looked at just this problem a while ago, and came to the conclusion that
> what was needed was a COW bit, to show that there was i/o in flight, and that
> before modification it needed to be copied. Since you don't want to let that
> recurse, you don't start writing the copy until the original is written and
> freed. Ideally you wouldn't bother to finish writing the original, but that
> doesn't seem possible. That allows at most two copies of a chunk to take up
> memory space at once, although it's still ugly and can be a bottleneck.

Copying the data would be performance overkill. You can really write
different data to different disks, you just must not forget to resync them
after a crash. The filesystem/application will recover with either old or
new data --- it just won't recover when it's reading old and new data from
the same location.

From my point of view that trick with thread doing sync() and turning off
region bits looks best. I'd like to know if that solution doesn't have any
other flaw.

> For reliable operation I would want all copies (and/or CRCs) to be written on
> an fsync, by the time I bother to fsync I really, really, want the data on the
> disk.

fsync already works this way.

Mikulas


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