Re: [Lsf-pc] [LSF/MM TOPIC] Badblocks checking/representation in filesystems

[Vishal Verma <vishal.l.verma@intel.com>]

On 01/18, Jan Kara wrote:
> On Tue 17-01-17 15:37:05, Vishal Verma wrote:
> > I do mean that in the filesystem, for every IO, the badblocks will be
> > checked. Currently, the pmem driver does this, and the hope is that the
> > filesystem can do a better job at it. The driver unconditionally checks
> > every IO for badblocks on the whole device. Depending on how the
> > badblocks are represented in the filesystem, we might be able to quickly
> > tell if a file/range has existing badblocks, and error out the IO
> > accordingly.
> > 
> > At mount the the fs would read the existing badblocks on the block
> > device, and build its own representation of them. Then during normal
> > use, if the underlying badblocks change, the fs would get a notification
> > that would allow it to also update its own representation.
> 
> So I believe we have to distinguish three cases so that we are on the same
> page.
> 
> 1) PMEM is exposed only via a block interface for legacy filesystems to
> use. Here, all the bad blocks handling IMO must happen in NVDIMM driver.
> Looking from outside, the IO either returns with EIO or succeeds. As a
> result you cannot ever ger rid of bad blocks handling in the NVDIMM driver.

Correct.

> 
> 2) PMEM is exposed for DAX aware filesystem. This seems to be what you are
> mostly interested in. We could possibly do something more efficient than
> what NVDIMM driver does however the complexity would be relatively high and
> frankly I'm far from convinced this is really worth it. If there are so
> many badblocks this would matter, the HW has IMHO bigger problems than
> performance.

Correct, and Dave was of the opinion that once at least XFS has reverse
mapping support (which it does now), adding badblocks information to
that should not be a hard lift, and should be a better solution. I
suppose should try to benchmark how much of a penalty the current badblock
checking in the NVVDIMM driver imposes. The penalty is not because there
may be a large number of badblocks, but just due to the fact that we
have to do this check for every IO, in fact, every 'bvec' in a bio.

> 
> 3) PMEM filesystem - there things are even more difficult as was already
> noted elsewhere in the thread. But for now I'd like to leave those aside
> not to complicate things too much.

Agreed that that merits consideration and a whole discussion  by itself,
based on the points Audiry raised.

> 
> Now my question: Why do we bother with badblocks at all? In cases 1) and 2)
> if the platform can recover from MCE, we can just always access persistent
> memory using memcpy_mcsafe(), if that fails, return -EIO. Actually that
> seems to already happen so we just need to make sure all places handle
> returned errors properly (e.g. fs/dax.c does not seem to) and we are done.
> No need for bad blocks list at all, no slow down unless we hit a bad cell
> and in that case who cares about performance when the data is gone...

Even when we have MCE recovery, we cannot do away with the badblocks
list:
1. My understanding is that the hardware's ability to do MCE recovery is
limited/best-effort, and is not guaranteed. There can be circumstances
that cause a "Processor Context Corrupt" state, which is unrecoverable.
2. We still need to maintain a badblocks list so that we know what
blocks need to be cleared (via the ACPI method) on writes.

> 
> For platforms that cannot recover from MCE - just buy better hardware ;).
> Seriously, I have doubts people can seriously use a machine that will
> unavoidably randomly reboot (as there is always a risk you hit error that
> has not been uncovered by background scrub). But maybe for big cloud providers
> the cost savings may offset for the inconvenience, I don't know. But still
> for that case a bad blocks handling in NVDIMM code like we do now looks
> good enough?

The current handling is good enough for those systems, yes.

> 
> 								Honza
> -- 
> Jan Kara <jack@suse.com>
> SUSE Labs, CR
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