fsync: giving up on dirty

[Ivan Voras]

Hi,

One of the machines I take care of started recently started recording
messages such as these in the logs:

Feb 28 04:02:09 skynet kernel: fsync: giving up on dirty
Feb 28 04:02:09 skynet kernel: 0xfffffe000fef2780: tag devfs, type VCHR
Feb 28 04:02:09 skynet kernel: usecount 1, writecount 0, refcount 2400
mountedhere 0xfffffe000fd25200
Feb 28 04:02:09 skynet kernel: flags ()
Feb 28 04:02:09 skynet kernel: v_object 0xfffffe000fe96d98 ref 0 pages 23990
Feb 28 04:02:09 skynet kernel: lock type devfs: EXCL by thread
0xfffffe000feb5000 (pid 44968)
Feb 28 04:02:09 skynet kernel: dev multipath/hpdisk4-web

I'm leaning towards suspecting bad hardware - the device behind
"multipath/hpdisk4-web" is an old HP MSA FC storage (which I wouldn't
recommend to anyone), but though verbose, the message lacks device-level
specifics. I would expect messages to be logged by the isp driver, or
the CAM layer, or even GEOM, but there is nothing there - only this
"fsync" message.

From the code, it looks like an transient condition (printed in the case
of EAGAIN), but the hardware here is behaving a bit suspect so I'd like
to make sure - should I ignore this message?


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