[PATCH] xfs: introduce "metasync" api to sync metadata to fsblock

[Eric Sandeen]

On 10/14/19 4:43 AM, Jan Kara wrote:
> On Mon 14-10-19 16:33:15, Pingfan Liu wrote:
>> On Sun, Oct 13, 2019 at 09:34:17AM -0700, Darrick J. Wong wrote:
>>> On Sun, Oct 13, 2019 at 10:37:00PM +0800, Pingfan Liu wrote:
>>>> When using fadump (fireware assist dump) mode on powerpc, a mismatch
>>>> between grub xfs driver and kernel xfs driver has been obsevered.  Note:
>>>> fadump boots up in the following sequence: fireware -> grub reads kernel
>>>> and initramfs -> kernel boots.
>>>>
>>>> The process to reproduce this mismatch:
>>>>    - On powerpc, boot kernel with fadump=on and edit /etc/kdump.conf.
>>>>    - Replacing "path /var/crash" with "path /var/crashnew", then, "kdumpctl
>>>>      restart" to rebuild the initramfs. Detail about the rebuilding looks
>>>>      like: mkdumprd /boot/initramfs-`uname -r`.img.tmp;
>>>>            mv /boot/initramfs-`uname -r`.img.tmp /boot/initramfs-`uname -r`.img
>>>>            sync
>>>>    - "echo c >/proc/sysrq-trigger".
>>>>
>>>> The result:
>>>> The dump image will not be saved under /var/crashnew/* as expected, but
>>>> still saved under /var/crash.
>>>>
>>>> The root cause:
>>>> As Eric pointed out that on xfs, 'sync' ensures the consistency by writing
>>>> back metadata to xlog, but not necessary to fsblock. This raises issue if
>>>> grub can not replay the xlog before accessing the xfs files. Since the
>>>> above dir entry of initramfs should be saved as inline data with xfs_inode,
>>>> so xfs_fs_sync_fs() does not guarantee it written to fsblock.
>>>>
>>>> umount can be used to write metadata fsblock, but the filesystem can not be
>>>> umounted if still in use.
>>>>
>>>> There are two ways to fix this mismatch, either grub or xfs. It may be
>>>> easier to do this in xfs side by introducing an interface to flush metadata
>>>> to fsblock explicitly.
>>>>
>>>> With this patch, metadata can be written to fsblock by:
>>>>    # update AIL
>>>>    sync
>>>>    # new introduced interface to flush metadata to fsblock
>>>>    mount -o remount,metasync mountpoint
>>>
>>> I think this ought to be an ioctl or some sort of generic call since the
>>> jbd2 filesystems (ext3, ext4, ocfs2) suffer from the same "$BOOTLOADER
>>> is too dumb to recover logs but still wants to write to the fs"
>>> checkpointing problem.
>> Yes, a syscall sounds more reasonable.
>>>
>>> (Or maybe we should just put all that stuff in a vfat filesystem, I
>>> don't know...)
>> I think it is unavoidable to involve in each fs' implementation. What
>> about introducing an interface sync_to_fsblock(struct super_block *sb) in
>> the struct super_operations, then let each fs manage its own case?
> 
> Well, we already have a way to achieve what you need: fsfreeze.
> Traditionally, that is guaranteed to put fs into a "clean" state very much
> equivalent to the fs being unmounted and that seems to be what the
> bootloader wants so that it can access the filesystem without worrying
> about some recovery details. So do you see any problem with replacing
> 'sync' in your example above with 'fsfreeze /boot && fsfreeze -u /boot'?
> 
> 								Honza

The problem with fsfreeze is that if the device you want to quiesce is, say,
the root fs, freeze isn't really a good option.

But the other thing I want to highlight about this approach is that it does not
solve the root problem: something is trying to read the block device without
first replaying the log.

A call such as the proposal here is only going to leave consistent metadata at
the time the call returns; at any time after that, all guarantees are off again,
so the problem hasn't been solved.

-Eric