ZFS works best when it is notified as soon as possible when a device
failure occurs. This allows it to immediately start any recovery
actions which may be needed. In theory Linux supports a flag which
can be set on bio's called FAILFAST which provides this quick
notification by disabling the retry logic in the lower scsi layers.
That's the theory at least. In practice is turns out that while the
flag exists you oddly have to set it with the BIO_RW_AHEAD flag.
And even when it's set it you may get retries in the low level
drivers decides that's the right behavior, or if you don't get the
right error codes reported to the scsi midlayer.
Unfortunately, without additional kernels patchs there's not much
which can be done to improve this. Basically, this just means that
it may take 2-3 minutes before a ZFS is notified properly that a
device has failed. This can be improved and I suspect I'll be
submitting patches upstream to handle this.
All the upper layers of zfs expect zio->io_error to be positive. I was
careful but I missed one instance in vdev_disk_physio_completion() which
could return a negative error. To ensure all cases are always caught I
had additionally added an ASSERT() to check this before zio_interpret().
Finally, as a debugging aid when zfs is build with --enable-debug all
errors from the backing block devices will be reported to the console
with an error message like this:
ZFS: zio error=5 type=1 offset=4217856 size=8192 flags=60440
This commit fixes a bug in vdev_disk_open() in which the whole_disk property
was getting set to 0 for disk devices, even when it was stored as a 1 when the
zpool was created. The whole_disk property lets us detect when the partition
suffix should be stripped from the device name in CLI output. It is also used
to determine how writeback cache should be set for a device.
When an existing zpool is imported its configuration is read from the vdev
label by user space in zpool_read_label(). The whole_disk property is saved in
the nvlist which gets passed into the kernel, where it in turn gets saved in
the vdev struct in vdev_alloc(). Therefore, this value is available in
vdev_disk_open() and should not be overridden by checking the provided device
path, since that path will likely point to a partition and the check will
return the wrong result.
We also add an ASSERT that the whole_disk property is set. We are not aware of
any cases where vdev_disk_open() should be called with a config that doesn't
have this property set. The ASSERT is there so that when debugging is enabled
we can identify any legitimate cases that we are missing. If we never hit the
ASSERT, we can at some point remove it along with the conditional whole_disk
check.
Signed-off-by: Brian Behlendorf <behlendorf1@llnl.gov>
