[dm-devel] dm-mq and end_clone_request()

[Mike Snitzer]

On Wed, Jul 20 2016 at 10:08am -0400,
Mike Snitzer <snitzer at redhat.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 19 2016 at  6:57pm -0400,
> Bart Van Assche <bart.vanassche at sandisk.com> wrote:
> 
> > Hello Mike,
> > 
> > If I run a fio data integrity test against kernel v4.7-rc7 then I
> > see often that fio reports I/O errors if a path is removed despite
> > queue_if_no_path having been set in /etc/multipath.conf. Further
> > analysis showed that this happens because during SCSI device removal
> > a SCSI device enters state SDEV_CANCEL before the block layer queue
> > is marked as "dying". In that state I/O requests submitted to that
> > SCSI device are failed with -EIO. The behavior for
> > end_clone_request() in drivers/md/dm.c for such requests is as
...
> > - With multiqueue support enabled, pass the "error" argument to
> >   dm_complete_request().
> 
> The error arg is passed to dm_complete_request() regardless of queue
> type but it is only immediately used by the blk-mq API (via
> blk_mq_complete_request).
> 
> > Shouldn't end_clone_request() requeue failed requests in both cases
> > instead of passing the I/O error to the submitter only if multiqueue
> > is enabled?
> 
> Pretty sure you'll find it is _not_ blk-mq that is passing the error
> up.  (But if I'm proven wrong that will be welcomed news).
>
> The error passed to dm_complete_request() is always used to set
> tio->error which is later used by dm_done().  DM core handles errors
> later via softirq in dm_done() -- where the error is passed into the
> target_type's rq_end_io hook.
> 
> So in DM multipath you'll see do_end_io() we do finally act on the error
> we got from the lower layer.  And if the error is -EIO, noretry_error()
> will return true and -EIO will be returned up the IO stack.

For some reason I thought -EIO was considered not retryable.  That's
obviously wrong (e.g. noretry_error() doesn't seize on -EIO).

> In the end we're relying on SCSI to properly categorize the underlying
> faults as retryable vs not -- via SCSI's differentiated IO errors.
> 
> Unfortunately I'm not seeing anything that DM multipath can do
> differently here.  -EIO is _always_ propagated up.
> 
> It is strange that all the dm-mq testing that has been done didn't ever
> catch this.  The mptest testsuite is a baseline for validating DM
> multipath (and request-based DM core) changes.  But I've also had Red
> Hat's QE hammer dm-mq with heavy IO (in terms of the "dt" utility) on a
> larger NetApp testbed in the face of regular controller faults.
> 
> Must be this scenario of SDEV_CANCEL is a race that is relatively
> unique/rare to your testbed?
> 
> This raises the question: should SCSI be returning something other than
> -EIO for this case?  E.g. an error that is retryable?

So it must be that blk-mq is somehow returning -EIO earlier based on
rq->errors that is established during blk_mq_complete_request().

Please try this patch (not happy with it since it assumes all
request-based DM targets will handle IO errors -- which is fine for now
since DM multipath is the only one).  Could be you've already tried
this?  Does it fix your problem?

diff --git a/drivers/md/dm-rq.c b/drivers/md/dm-rq.c
index 7a96618..347ff25 100644
--- a/drivers/md/dm-rq.c
+++ b/drivers/md/dm-rq.c
@@ -414,7 +414,7 @@ static void dm_complete_request(struct request *rq, int error)
 	if (!rq->q->mq_ops)
 		blk_complete_request(rq);
 	else
-		blk_mq_complete_request(rq, error);
+		blk_mq_complete_request(rq, 0);
 }
 
 /*