Re: loop subsystem corrupted after mounting multiple btrfs sub-volumes

["Austin S. Hemmelgarn" <ahferroin7@gmail.com>]

On 2016-02-26 12:07, Stanislav Brabec wrote:
> Austin S. Hemmelgarn wrote:
>  > On 2016-02-26 10:50, Stanislav Brabec wrote:
>> That's just it though, from what I can tell based on what I've seen and
>> what you said above, mount(8) isn't doing things correctly in this case.
>>   If we were to do this with something like XFS or ext4, the filesystem
>> would probably end up completely messed up just because of the log
>> replay code (assuming they actually mount the second time, I'm not sure
>> what XFS would do in this case, but I believe that ext4 would allow the
>> mount as long as the mmp feature is off).  It would make sense that this
>> behavior wouldn't have been noticed before (and probably wouldn't have
>> mattered even if it had been), because most filesystems don't allow
>> multiple mounts even if they're all RO, and most people don't try to
>> mount other filesystems multiple times as a result of this.  If this
>> behavior of allocating a new loop device for each call on a given file
>> is in fact not BTRFS specific (as implied by your statement about a
>> possible workaround in mount(8)), then mount(8) really should be fixed
>> to not do that before we even consider looking at the issues in BTRFS,
>> as that is behavior that has serious potential to result in data
>> corruption for any filesystem, not just BTRFS.
>
> Well, kernel could "fix" it in a simple way:
>
> - don't allow two loop devices pointing to the same file
> or
> - don't allow two loop devices pointing to the same file being used by
>    mount(2).
This has legitimate usage in testing multipath configuration and 
operation, and in testing that filesystems handle this correctly.  On 
top of that, it becomes decidedly non-trivial to handle when you 
consider that loop devices can map a fixed range of a file independent 
of the rest of the file (this used to be the way to pull partitions out 
of raw disk images before the device mapper became as commonplace as it 
is now).
>
> Then util-linux would need a behavior change for sure.
>
>>> I already found another inconsistency caused by this implementation:
>>>
>>> /proc/self/mountinfo reports subvolid of the nearest upper sub-volume
>>> root for the bind mount, not the sub-volume that was used for creating
>>> this bind mount, and subvolid that potentially does not correspond to
>>> any subvolume root.
>>>
>>> This could causes problem for evaluation of order of umount(2) that
>>> should prevent EBUSY.
>>>
>>> I was talking about it with David Sterba, and he told, that in the
>>> current implementation is not optimal. btrfs driver does not have
>>> sufficient information to evaluate true root of the bind mount.
>> I've noticed this before myself, but I've never seen any issues
>> resulting from it; however, I've also not tried calling BTRFS related
>> ioctls on or from such a mount, so I may just have been lucky.
>
> I can imagine two side effects deeply inside mount(8):
>
> - "mount -a" uses subvol internally for a path lookup of the default
>    volume or volume corresponding to subvolid. (Only the GIT version,
>    not yet in 2.27.1.) I could imagine that the lookup is confused by a
>    bind mount reporting the searched subvolid and a "random" subvol
>    subvol.  But I don't have a reproducer yet, and I am not sure,
>    whether it is really possible.
>
> - "umount -a" could have a problem to find a proper order to umount(2)
>    without EBUSY. I did not check the algorithm, so I am not sure,
>    whether it is a real issue.
If BTRFS can't get the correct ref on the FS root internally, then there 
are all kinds of things that could go wrong when you try to do any of 
the typical maintenance stuff on it (like balancing, scrub, defrag, 
snapshot/subvolume creation/deletion, etc).  In essence, if you try to 
do almost anything using the btrfs command line tools on that mount 
point, it might fail in new and interesting ways.
>
>
> P. S.: There were many problems with btrfs in mount(8):
>
> https://git.kernel.org/cgit/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git/commit/?id=c4af75a84ef3430003c77be2469869aaf3a63e2a
> https://git.kernel.org/cgit/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git/commit/?id=618a88140e26a134727a39c906c9cdf6d0c04513
> https://git.kernel.org/cgit/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git/commit/?id=d2f8267847ecbe763a3b63af1289bf1179cd8c45
> https://git.kernel.org/cgit/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git/commit/?id=2cd28fc82d0c947472a4700d5e764265916fba1e
> https://git.kernel.org/cgit/utils/util-linux/util-linux.git/commit/?id=352740e88e2c9cb180fe845ce210b1c7b5ad88c7
>
The first commit is just test cases, and the others are specific issues 
that only affected BTRFS which have nothing to do with this thread at 
all other than involving mount(8) and BTRFS.  The originally stated 
issue that this thread is about is specific to loop mounting a BTRFS 
filesystem stored in a file multiple times.  The issue can be 
empirically demonstrated to be a result of an interaction between BTRFS 
behavior regarding duplicate filesystems and an implementation detail of 
mount(8).  The BTRFS behavior WRT duplicate FS UUID's is not going away 
any time soon (believe me, it's been discussed _a lot_ on the mailing 
list in the context of almost everything except loop devices, and the 
developers have pretty much stated that there is no sane way to handle 
it), and the mount(8) behavior has the potential to cause either data 
corruption or similar behavior in the future (I would expect that XFS 
with metadata checksumming enabled would cause a similar interaction, 
although they probably would handle it better).