- Improved locking and destruction process to fix crashes.
- Improved "automatic" configuration method to make it consistent and safe
by reading metadata back from all specified paths after writing to one.
- Added provider size check to reduce chance of ordering conflict with
other GEOM classes.
- Added "manual" configuration method without using on-disk metadata.
- Added "add" and "remove" commands to allow manage paths manually.
- Failed paths are no longer dropped from geom, but only marked as FAIL
and excluded from I/O operations.
- Automatically restore failed paths when all others paths are marked
as failed, for example, because of device-caused (not transport) errors.
- Added "fail" and "restore" commands to manually control FAIL flag.
- geom is now destroyed on last path disconnection.
- Added optional Active/Active mode support. Unlike Active/Passive
mode, load evenly distributed between all working paths. If supported by
the device, it allows to significantly improve performance, utilizing
bandwidth of all paths. It is controlled by -A option during creation.
Disabled by default now.
- Improved `status` and `list` commands output.
Sponsored by: iXsystems, inc.
MFC after: 1 month
arrangement that has no intrinsic internal knowledge of whether devices
it is given are truly multipath devices. As such, this is a simplistic
approach, but still a useful one.
The basic approach is to (at present- this will change soon) use camcontrol
to find likely identical devices and and label the trailing sector of the
first one. This label contains both a full UUID and a name. The name is
what is presented in /dev/multipath, but the UUID is used as a true
distinguishor at g_taste time, thus making sure we don't have chaos
on a shared SAN where everyone names their data multipath as "Fred".
The first of N identical devices (and N *may* be 1!) becomes the active
path until a BIO request is failed with EIO or ENXIO. When this occurs,
the active disk is ripped away and the next in a list is picked to
(retry and) continue with.
During g_taste events new disks that meet the match criteria for existing
multipath geoms get added to the tail end of the list.
Thus, this active/passive setup actually does work for devices which
go away and come back, as do (now) mpt(4) and isp(4) SAN based disks.
There is still a lot to do to improve this- like about 5 of the 12
recommendations I've received about it, but it's been functional enough
for a while that it deserves a broader test base.
Reviewed by: pjd
Sponsored by: IronPort Systems
MFC: 2 months
