Re: Making snapshot of logical volumes handling HVM domU causes OOPS and instability

["J. Roeleveld" <joost@antarean.org>]

Hi All,

Same again here, thought I'd chip in with some info from what I 
experienced/noticed on my system. (Not seen the instability described though).
I hope these help with isolating the OPs issue.

On Friday 03 September 2010 10:06:45 Scott Garron wrote:
> On 8/31/2010 2:06 PM, Scott Garron wrote:

<snipped>

I also use LVMs extensively and do similar steps for backups.
1) umount in domU
2) block-detach
3) lvcreate snapshot
4) block-attach
5) mount in domU

I, however, have no need for HVM and only use PV guests.
(All Linux)

>       On a hunch, I copied the kernel config from my desktop to the
> server, recompiled with those options, booted into it, and tried
> triggering the bug.  It took more than two tries this time around, but
> it became apparent pretty quickly that things weren't quite right.
> Creations and removals of snapshot volumes started causing lvm to return
> "/dev/dm-63: open failed: no such device or address" and something along
> the lines of (paraphrasing here) "unable to remove active logical
> volume" when the snapshot wasn't mounted or active anywhere, but a few
> seconds later, without changing anything, you could remove it.  udev
> didn't seem to be removing the dm-?? devices from /dev, though.

I also, on occasion, get the same issue with the "unable to remove active 
logical volume" even though they have been umounted.
Sometimes I can then remove them later, sometimes I have to "force" the 
snapshot to fail by filling up the snapshot myself.
when that happens, I get similar messages about " /dev/dm-63: open failed: no 
such device or address "

Are you certain the snapshots are large enough to hold all possible changes 
that might occur on the LV during the existence of the snapshot?

Another thing I notice, which might be of help to people who understand this 
better then I do, in my backup-script, sometimes step "5" fails because the 
domU hasn't noticed the device is attached again when I try to mount it.
The domU-commands are run using SSH-connections.

--
Joost