linux-imx

md raid0/linear: Mark array as 'broken' and fail BIOs if a member is gone

Currently md raid0/linear are not provided with any mechanism to validate
if an array member got removed or failed. The driver keeps sending BIOs
regardless of the state of array members, and kernel shows state 'clean'
in the 'array_state' sysfs attribute. This leads to the following
situation: if a raid0/linear array member is removed and the array is
mounted, some user writing to this array won't realize that errors are
happening unless they check dmesg or perform one fsync per written file.
Despite udev signaling the member device is gone, 'mdadm' cannot issue the
STOP_ARRAY ioctl successfully, given the array is mounted.

In other words, no -EIO is returned and writes (except direct ones) appear
normal. Meaning the user might think the wrote data is correctly stored in
the array, but instead garbage was written given that raid0 does stripping
(and so, it requires all its members to be working in order to not corrupt
data). For md/linear, writes to the available members will work fine, but
if the writes go to the missing member(s), it'll cause a file corruption
situation, whereas the portion of the writes to the missing devices aren't
written effectively.

This patch changes this behavior: we check if the block device's gendisk
is UP when submitting the BIO to the array member, and if it isn't, we flag
the md device as MD_BROKEN and fail subsequent I/Os to that device; a read
request to the array requiring data from a valid member is still completed.
While flagging the device as MD_BROKEN, we also show a rate-limited warning
in the kernel log.

A new array state 'broken' was added too: it mimics the state 'clean' in
every aspect, being useful only to distinguish if the array has some member
missing. We rely on the MD_BROKEN flag to put the array in the 'broken'
state. This state cannot be written in 'array_state' as it just shows
one or more members of the array are missing but acts like 'clean', it
wouldn't make sense to write it.

With this patch, the filesystem reacts much faster to the event of missing
array member: after some I/O errors, ext4 for instance aborts the journal
and prevents corruption. Without this change, we're able to keep writing
in the disk and after a machine reboot, e2fsck shows some severe fs errors
that demand fixing. This patch was tested in ext4 and xfs filesystems, and
requires a 'mdadm' counterpart to handle the 'broken' state.

Cc: Song Liu <songliubraving@fb.com>
Reviewed-by: NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de>
Signed-off-by: Guilherme G. Piccoli <gpiccoli@canonical.com>
Signed-off-by: Song Liu <songliubraving@fb.com>