[dm-devel] dm: dm-cache fails to write the cache device in writethrough mode

[Darrick J. Wong]

On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 06:34:28PM -0400, Mike Snitzer wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 22 2013 at  4:11pm -0400,
> Darrick J. Wong <darrick.wong at oracle.com> wrote:
> 
> > The new writethrough strategy for dm-cache issues a bio to the origin device,
> > remaps the bio to the cache device, and issues the bio to the cache device.
> > However, the block layer modifies bi_sector and bi_size, so we need to preserve
> > these or else nothing gets written to the cache (bi_size == 0).  This fixes the
> > problem where someone writes a block through the cache, but a subsequent reread
> > (from the cache) returns old contents.
> 
> Your writethrough blkid test results are certainly strange.  But I'm not
> aware of where the block layer would modify bi_size and bi_sector;
> please elaborate.
> 
> I cannot reproduce your original report.  I developed
> 'test_writethrough_ext4_uuids_match', apologies for the ruby code:

Hmm... I'm building my kernels off 0a7e453103b9718d357688b83bb968ee108cc874 in
Linus' tree (post 3.9-rc3).  This is the full output of dmsetup table:

moocache-blocks: 0 1039360 linear 8:16 9088
moocache-metadata: 0 8704 linear 8:16 384
moocache: 0 67108864 cache 253:0 253:1 8:0 512 1 writethrough default 4 random_threshold 4 sequential_threshold 32768

253:0 -> moocache-metadata and 253:1 -> moocache-blocks.

I'm curious what your setup is...

--D

> 
>   def test_writethrough_ext4_uuids_match
>     size = meg(10)
>   
>     # wipe the origin to ensure we don't accidentally have the same
>     # data on it.
>     with_standard_linear(:data_size => size) do |origin|
>       wipe_device(origin)
>     end
> 
>     uuid = "deadbeef-cafe-dead-beef-cafedeadbeef"
> 
>     # format the cache device with a specific uuid
>     with_standard_cache(:format => true,
>                         :io_mode => :writethrough,
>                         :data_size => size) do |cache|
>       fs = FS::file_system(:ext4, cache)
>       fs.format(:uuid => uuid)
>       FS::assert_fs_uuid(uuid, cache)
>     end
> 
>     # origin should have the same uuid as the cache
>     with_standard_linear(:data_size => size) do |origin|
>       FS::assert_fs_uuid(uuid, origin)
>     end
>   end
> 
> This test was committed to the 'devel' branch of my thinp-test-suite
> tree: git://github.com/snitm/thinp-test-suite.git
> 
> Also the existing 'test_writethrough' test works fine.
> 
> So for now:
> 
> Nacked-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer at redhat.com>
> 
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