[Ocfs2-devel] [patch 1/6] ocfs2: o2hb: add negotiate timer

[Mark Fasheh]

On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 02:50:28PM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> From: Junxiao Bi <junxiao.bi at oracle.com>
> Subject: ocfs2: o2hb: add negotiate timer

Thank you for the well written patch description by the way.


> This series of patches is to fix the issue that when storage down, all
> nodes will fence self due to write timeout.
> 
> With this patch set, all nodes will keep going until storage back online,
> except if the following issue happens, then all nodes will do as before to
> fence self.
> 
> 1. io error got
> 2. network between nodes down
> 3. nodes panic
> 
> This patch (of 6):
> 
> When storage down, all nodes will fence self due to write timeout.  The
> negotiate timer is designed to avoid this, with it node will wait until
> storage up again.
> 
> Negotiate timer working in the following way:
> 
> 1. The timer expires before write timeout timer, its timeout is half
>    of write timeout now.  It is re-queued along with write timeout timer.
>    If expires, it will send NEGO_TIMEOUT message to master node(node with
>    lowest node number).  This message does nothing but marks a bit in a
>    bitmap recording which nodes are negotiating timeout on master node.

I went through the patch series, and generally feel that the code
is well written and straight forward. I have two issues regarding
how this operates. Otherwise, I like the general direction this
is taking.

The first is easy - we're updating the o2cb network protocol and
need to bump the protocol version otherwise a node that doesn't
speak these new messages could mount and even be selected as the
'master' without actually being able to participate in this scheme.


My other concern is whether the notion of 'lowest node' can
change if one comes online while the cluster is negotiating this
timeout. Obviously in the case where all the disks are unplugged
this couldn't happen because a new node couldn't begin to
heartbeat.

What about a situation where only some nodes are negotiating this
timeout? On the ones which have no disk access, lowest node
number still won't change since they can't read the new
heartbeats. On those with stable access though, can't this value
change? How does that effect this algorithm?

Thanks,
	--Mark

--
Mark Fasheh