releng/13 release/13.0.0 : odd/incorrect diff result over nfs (in a zfs file systems context)

Mark Millard marklmi at yahoo.com
Fri May 21 02:39:06 UTC 2021



> On 2021-May-20, at 18:09, Rick Macklem <rmacklem at uoguelph.ca> wrote:
> 
> Oh, one additional thing that I'll dare to top post...
> r367492 broke the TCP upcalls that the NFS server uses, such
> that intermittent hangs of NFS mounts to FreeBSD13 servers can occur.
> This has not yet been resolved in "main" etc and could explain
> why an RPC could time out for a soft mount.

See later notes that I added: soft mount is not required
to see the problem.

> You can revert the patch in r367492 to avoid the problem.

If I understand right, you are indicating that this would
not apply to the non-soft mount case that I got.

> Disabling TSO, LRO are also de-facto standard things to do when
> you observe weird NFS  behaviour, because they are often broken
> in various network device drivers.

I'll have to figure out how to experiment with such. Things
are at defaults rather generally on the systems. I'm not
literate in the subject areas.

I'm the only user of the machines and network. It is not
outward facing. It is a rather small EtherNet network.

> rick
> 
> ________________________________________
> From: owner-freebsd-stable at freebsd.org <owner-freebsd-stable at freebsd.org> on behalf of Rick Macklem <rmacklem at uoguelph.ca>
> Sent: Thursday, May 20, 2021 8:55 PM
> To: FreeBSD-STABLE Mailing List; Mark Millard
> Subject: Re: releng/13 release/13.0.0 : odd/incorrect diff result over nfs (in a zfs file systems context)
> 
> Mark Millard wrote:
>> [I warn that I'm a fairly minimal user of NFS
>> mounts, not knowing all that much. I'm mostly
>> reporting this in case it ends up as evidence
>> via eventually matching up with others observing
>> possibly related oddities.]
>> 
>> I got the following odd sequence (that I've
>> mixed notes into). It involved a diff -r over NFS
>> showing differences (files missing) and then a
>> later diff finding matches for the same files,
>> no file system changes made on either machine.
>> I'm unable to reproduce the oddity on demand.
>> 
>> Note: A larger scope diff -r originally returned the
>> below as well, but doing the narrower diff -r did
>> repeat the result and that is what I show. (I
>> make no use of devel/ice .)
>> 
>> # diff -r /usr/ports/devel/ice/files /mnt/devel/ice/files | more
>> Only in /usr/ports/devel/ice/files: Make.rules.FreeBSD
. . .
>> Only in /usr/ports/devel/ice/files: patch-scripts-TestUtil.py
>> 
>> Note: The above was not expected. So I tried:
>> 
>> # ls -Tld /mnt/devel/ice/files/*
>> -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel   755 Apr 21 21:07:54 2021 /mnt/devel/ice/files/Make.rules.FreeBSD
. . .
>> -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  2588 Apr 21 21:07:54 2021 /mnt/devel/ice/files/patch-scripts-TestUtil.py
>> 
>> Note: So that indicated that the files were there on the
>> machine that /mnt references. So attempting the original
>> diff -r again:
>> 
>> # diff -r /usr/ports/devel/ice/files /mnt/devel/ice/files | more
>> #
>> 
>> (Empty difference.)
>> 
>> Note: So after the explicit "ls -Tld /mnt/devel/ice/files/*"
>> the odd result of the diff -r no longer happened: no
>> differences reported.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> For reference (both machines reported):
>> 
>> . . .
>> The original mount command was on CA72_16Gp_ZFS:
>> 
>> # mount -onoatime,soft 192.168.1.170:/usr/ports/ /mnt/
> The likely explanation for this is your use of a "soft" mount.
> - If the NFS server is slow to respond or there is a temporary network issue,
>   the RPC request can time out and then the
>   syscall can fail with EINT/ETIMEDOUT. Since almost nothing, including the
>    readdir(3) libc functions expect syscalls to fail this way...
>    Then the cached directory is messed up.
>    Doing the "ls" read the directory again and fixed the problem.
> 
> Try to reproduce it for a mount without the "soft" option.
> (If a mount point is hung, due to an unresponsive server "umount -N /mnt"
> can usually get rid of it.)
> Personally, I thought "soft" was a bad idea when Sun introduced it in NFS in 1985
> and I still feel that way.
> --> If you can reproduce it without "soft" then I can't explain it.
>      To be honest, the directory reading/caching code in the NFSv3 client
>      hasn't changed significantly in literally decades, as far as I can remember.

Well . . . trying an even wider scope diff than
the original . . .

# umount /mnt/
# mount -onoatime 192.168.1.170:/usr/ports/ /mnt/
# diff -r /usr/ports/ /mnt/ | more
Only in /mnt/databases/mongodb42/files/aarch64: patch-src_third__party_mozjs-60_
Only in /usr/ports/databases/mongodb42/files/aarch64: patch-src_third__party_mozjs-60_platform_aarch64_freebsd_build_Unified__cpp__js__src25.cpp
Only in /usr/ports/devel/ice/files: Make.rules.FreeBSD
Only in /usr/ports/devel/ice/files: patch-config-Make.common.rules
Only in /usr/ports/devel/ice/files: patch-cpp-Makefile
. . .
Only in /usr/ports/devel/ice/files: patch-python-test-Slice-unicodePaths-run.py
Only in /usr/ports/devel/ice/files: patch-scripts-Expect.py
Only in /usr/ports/devel/ice/files: patch-scripts-IceGridAdmin.py
Only in /usr/ports/devel/ice/files: patch-scripts-TestUtil.py

So the devel/ice files showed up again.

But 2 other lines show up, one finding a file supposedly only
on /mnt/. . .

QUOTE
Only in /mnt/databases/mongodb42/files/aarch64: patch-src_third__party_mozjs-60_
END QUOTE

That seems to be a truncated file name. Looking directly on the machine that
/mnt/ references (hitting tab at the end of the partial name to show a
list):

# ls -Tld /usr/ports/databases/mongodb42/files/aarch64/patch-src_third__party_mozjs-60_
/usr/ports/databases/mongodb42/files/aarch64/patch-src_third__party_mozjs-60_gen-config.sh                                              
/usr/ports/databases/mongodb42/files/aarch64/patch-src_third__party_mozjs-60_platform_aarch64_freebsd_build_js-confdefs.h              
/usr/ports/databases/mongodb42/files/aarch64/patch-src_third__party_mozjs-60_platform_aarch64_freebsd_build_Unified__cpp__js__src0.cpp  
/usr/ports/databases/mongodb42/files/aarch64/patch-src_third__party_mozjs-60_platform_aarch64_freebsd_build_Unified__cpp__js__src1.cpp  
. . .  
/usr/ports/databases/mongodb42/files/aarch64/patch-src_third__party_mozjs-60_platform_aarch64_freebsd_build_Unified__cpp__js__src9.cpp  
/usr/ports/databases/mongodb42/files/aarch64/patch-src_third__party_mozjs-60_platform_aarch64_freebsd_include_js-config.h            

The other machine agrees (machine-local usage).

The other of the 2 new names is one of the matches to the prefix:

QUOTE
Only in /usr/ports/databases/mongodb42/files/aarch64: patch-src_third__party_mozjs-60_platform_aarch64_freebsd_build_Unified__cpp__js__src25.cpp
END QUOTE

For reference: I've not gotten any console messages about
anything during these.

> One additional thing to note is that cached directory contents are invalidated
> when the directory's ctime changes.

I'm not aware of anything that should have been touching the
/usr/ports file systems on either machine any time near my
diff activities. (I'm the only system user.)

> I am not sure how/if/when ZFS changes a
> directory's ctime. However, if it was badly broken, I'd hear about this a lot.
> (If the ZFS change to ZoL has changed its ctime handling, that might also explain it
> and I'll be hearing a lot more soon as FreeBSD13 becomes adopted. I never use ZFS and,
> as such, never test with it.)

I recently decided to try using bectl, which lead to my recent
ZFS-based system experiments.

This means I can boot the stable/13 or main [so: 14] that
I last built and try the same experiments with the same
/usr/ports file sysystems. releng/13 's release/13.0.0 ,
stable/13 , and main are all non-debug builds as stands. I
could add debug builds of any or all, but it would take
a while. (aarch64 4-core Cortex-A72 contexts.)

> --> For UFS, if you use mtime, directory caching does not work as well, which is
>       why the client directory caching code uses ctime and not mtime to detect that
>       a directory has changed and cached directory blocks need to be invalidated.
> 
> Jason Bacon did report a directory reading issue some months ago that never
> quite got resolved, although I recall he said he couldn't reproduce it after a
> system update, so he thought it was related to some local change he had made.
> (I can't remember his email or I'd add him to the cc so he could remind me what
> his case was. I do recall it being somewhat reproducible and happened for both
> UFS and ZFS.)
>> The network is just a local EtherNet.
> 



===
Mark Millard
marklmi at yahoo.com
( dsl-only.net went
away in early 2018-Mar)



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