Re: mismatch_cnt again

[Neil Brown <neilb@suse.de>]

On Tuesday November 10, piergiorgio.sartor@nexgo.de wrote:
> Hi again,
> 
> > It seems we might have been talking at cross-purposes.
> > 
> > When I wrote about the need for a threat model, it was in the
> > context of automatically determining which block was most
> > likely to be in error (e.g. voting with a 3-drive RAID1 or
> > fancy arithmetic with RAID6).  I do not believe there is any
> > value in doing that.  At least not automatically in the kernel
> > with the aim of just repairing which block was decided to be
> > most wrong.
> > 
> > You now seem to be talking about the ability to find out which
> > blocks are inconsistent.  That is very different.  I do agree there
> > is value in that.  Maybe it should appear in the kernel logs,
> > or maybe we could store the information and report in via sysfs
> > (the former would certainly be easier).
> 
> maybe there is a misunderstanding between us! :-)
> 
> Automatic repair *might* be a far end target, but I do
> agree, this needs to be clarified deeply.
> 
> I see the thing similarly to a previous comment from a
> fellow poster.
> To do:
> 1) detect which MD block is inconsistent
> 2) detect, when possible, which device component is responsible
> 3) trigger a repair action
> 
> This would be done all under user control, i.e. the user
> will get the mismatch count, maybe with some hint on which
> device could be guilty (RAID-6 or RAID-1/10 with multiple
> redundancy) and then he could decide what to do.
> 
> The user will have full control and full *responsability*
> on the action, but it will also be fully informed on what
> the situation is.
> 
> The system will tell: block ABC is inconsistent, maybe
> device /dev/sdX is guilty, you could: do nothing, resync
> the parity, try to repair.

I think just "block ABC is inconsistent" is sufficient.
user-space can then quiesce that part of the array, read the relevant
blocks, do any analysis that might be appropriate, and report to the
admin. 

> 
> As I mentioned some times ago, I built a RAID-6, where
> one disk, due to a strange cabling problem, was sometimes
> returning wrong data (one bit flip, actually).
> And this without any errors reported, i.e. a bit was
> sometimes flipped, at the very end it seems, and it
> was undetected by ECC/CRC/whatever.

That is a very interesting threat scenario - occasional bit flip on
read between media and memory.  I had a drive like that once.  One
particular bit in the sector would fairly often return '1' no matter
what had been written.  I had it in a RAID1 and it quickly made a mess
of the filesystem.

As you say, there is nothing that md can or should do about this
except report that something odd is happening, which it does, and
report where it is happening, which it does not.

NeilBrown