Dear Linux folks,

On 11/16/16 22:24, Donald Buczek wrote:
On 10.11.2016 14:59, Martin K. Petersen wrote:
"Paul" == Paul Menzel <pmen...@molgen.mpg.de> writes:

Linux does not provide device discovery ordering guarantees. You need
to fix your scripts to use UUIDs, filesystem labels, or DM devices to
get stable naming.
Paul> Indeed. But it worked for several years, so that *something* must
Paul> have changed that the ordering of the result of `getdents64` is
Paul> different now.

Could be changes in the PCI or platform code that causes things to be
enumerated differently. Whatever it is, it has nothing to do with the
3ware drivers themselves since they have been dormant for a long time.


Right. We further tracked it down. In fact its not a matter of driver
initialization order but of the way sysfs/kernfs hashes its object names
and thereby defines the order of names returned by getdents64 calls. In
fs/kernfs/dir.h the names are inserted into a red-black tree ordered by
the hashes over their names (and possibly namespace pointer, which in
our case is zero).

I've walked the rbtrees of the kernfs_node structs from
/sys/class/scsi_host showing their addresses, the hash values and the
names in a 4.4.27 system:

root:cu:/home/buczek/autofs/# ./peek-3w

ffff88046d847640 : 11bf1ddd : host0
ffff88046c56d3e8 : 11bf1e8d : host1
ffff88046c571c58 : 11bf1f3d : host2
ffff88046c572550 : 11bf1fed : host3
ffff88046c577dc0 : 11bf209d : host4
ffff88046a4bbaf0 : 11bf214d : host5

As can be seen, in 4.4 the hash algorithm happened to produce increasing
hash values for names like "host0","host1","host2",... In 4.8.6 the hash
values seem to be more random:

root:gynaekophobie:/home/buczek/autofs/# ./peek-3w

ffff88041df9a7f8 : 074af64b : host0
ffff88081db40528 : 1009cd9b : host9
ffff88041d3fba50 : 1c512bfb : host7
ffff88181d19c000 : 28988a5b : host5
ffff88041df5a780 : 34dfe8bb : host3
ffff88041d3f5e10 : 4127471b : host1
ffff88041ccbd258 : 562d7ccb : host8
ffff88201cd5f960 : 6274db2b : host6
ffff88141e2d0ca8 : 6ebc398b : host4
ffff88041df599d8 : 7b0397eb : host2

The relevant commit is 703b5fa  which includes

The commit message summary is *fs/dcache.c: Save one 32-bit multiply in dcache lookup*.

 static inline unsigned long end_name_hash(unsigned long hash)
 {
-       return (unsigned int)hash;
+       return __hash_32((unsigned int)hash);
 }

__hash_32 is a multiplication by 0x61C88647 ( hash.h )

And this exactly is the difference between the hash value of "host0" on
the 4.4 and the 4.8 system:

  DB<2> x sprintf '%x',0x11bf1ddd*0x61C88647
0  '6c750ef074af64b'

The bug, of course, is in the userspace tool tw_cli which wrongly
assumes that the names would be returned in the "right" order by getdents.

Nice analysis.

Unfortunately, I don’t find the discussion of the patch on the Linux kernel mailing list.

Searching for the summary only brings up *screen rotation flipped in 4.8-rc* [1].

As a dirty workaround, I've created a new wrapper, which uses ptrace to
pause the program on return from SYS_getdents64 and sorts the values
returned from the system call in the memory of the target process. >

I append the source of the wrapper.


Kind regards,

Paul


[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/8/30/739
    "screen rotation flipped in 4.8-rc"

Reply via email to