Re: [Scst-devel] scst blockio not working with drbd

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 3:38 PM, piotr nowat <now...@ho...>wrote:

>
> I have been testing the DRBD + SCST + Other targets problem further and see
> results which seem to be isolated to SCST.
>
>
>
> Attached is a diagram which shows the basic setup and the targets used.  In
> summary
>
>
>
> SCST in blockio mode does not seem to be compatible with DRBD (I don’t know
> who’s responsibly this is) but other targets (IET / LIO) seem to have no
> problem.
>
>
>
> It is not related to the concurrent threads which have been mentioned,
> there are NO drbd errors and I have even restricted traffic to single 512
> byte blocks. all relevant settings the same (queue depths, threads etc)
>
> The fileio modes do work – but will simply cause data corruption rendering
> them pointless in active-active
>

One has to be VERY careful when using vdisk_fileio in combination with
multi-path I/O and DRBD in active-active mode. It is very easy to cause data
corruption with such a setup. One has to make sure that SCST only confirms a
write as finished to the multipath initiator after the data involved in
write operation has been passed on to DRBD on both nodes. Hence, DRBD
protocol A would be a bad choice in this case - protocol C as you have
chosen should be fine though. You will have to set both *write_through=1*and
*nv_cache=0* in scst.conf (this combination of flags enables O_SYNC - I
haven't yet tested this combination myself though). I'm not sure whether
setting *o_direct=1* in scst.conf in addition to the already mentioned flags
would help performance in this case.

 The problem is simply that DRBD will not sync SCST Blockio traffic without
> a disconnect/reconnect.  Even then it will only sync the then outdated data.
> Any new writes which happen during this sync process will not be sync.  So
> after the trigger sync has finished you will still be left with X outdated
> and have to disconnect / reconnect again.
>
>
>
> Tests on local level using dd and fio (with even the most aggressive tests
> / async) work fine.
>
> Tests on IET / LIO with high or low queue depths work fine
>
>
>
> The default system is SLES11  with DRBD version 8.3.10 (tried others).
>
> I tried SUSE 11.4 but although others seemed to work SCST CORE DUMPED the
> moment it wrote to SCST (reported)
>
>
>
> I initial presumed that this could be some configuration, but this would
> seem less likely now maybe?
>

I haven't been able to reproduce this behavior with kernel 2.6.38.7 and
built-in DRBD version 8.3.9. I'll see whether I can reproduce this with one
of the kernels you mentioned above.

Bart.