On Tue, 2024-11-19 at 15:33 -0500, Benjamin Marzinski wrote: > On Tue, Nov 19, 2024 at 05:39:26PM +0100, Martin Wilck wrote: > > On Fri, 2024-11-15 at 18:22 -0500, Benjamin Marzinski wrote: > > > if libmp_mapinfo() is run on a device that has no active table, > > > it will now return with a new exit code, DMP_EMPTY, to signal > > > this. > > > Currently all code paths treat this identically to DMP_NOT_FOUND. > > > > > > Signed-off-by: Benjamin Marzinski <[email protected]> > > > > I just looked through the code again. I think with this change, we > > need > > to modify dm_flush_map__() and do_foreach_partmaps(). They should > > remove / act on empty maps. What do you think? > > I'm not sure that we need to add extra code to handle the possiblity > that an empty device could appear at any time, since like I said, > this is a corner case that I've never actually seen in the wild. So > if > a device was previously a valid multipath device, I don't think we > need > to worry about the possibility that it suddenly became empty. > > But I can see the value in running something like > > # multipath -F > > and having it clean up any empty multipath devices. As for > do_foreach_partmaps(), are you thinking about cleaning up empty > partition devices or non-empty partition devices on top of empty > multipath devices? > > Non-empty partition devices on top of empty multipath devices would > imply that a multipath device was valid at one point, and then became > empty, which I don't see an easy way of happening. > > The problem with empty partition devices is that partition devices > are > created by kpartx completely asynchronously to us. That empty > partition > device could be in the process of being created.
Right, but multipathd is in the process of deleting the map. If there's actually a race and kpartx finishes creating the partition map, multipathd will fail to remove the multipath map. The likely outcome will be a multipath map with just one partition device. If multipathd comes first, kpartx will fail, but there's a good chance that multipathd will succeed in flushing the multipath map, so we'll end up with a consistent state. If kpartx had run a little earlier and had finished setting up the map, multipathd would have removed it, and if kpartx had run a little later, it would have failed because of a missing target. > So I'm not against checking for DMP_EMPTY in dm_flush_map__() and > removing the empty device if its opencount is 0. But I'd rather not > try messing with partmaps. Do you have a specific case you are > worried > about? >From the argument above, I'd say that flushing empty partition maps is the right thing to do, for consistency reasons. But now I may be overlooking something. Martin
