The persistent-data library used by dm-thin, dm-cache, etc is
transactional. If anything goes wrong, such as an io error when writing
new metadata or a power failure, then we roll back to the last
transaction.
Atomicity when committing a transaction is achieved by:
a) Never overwriting data from the previous transaction.
b) Writing the superblock last, after all other metadata has hit the
disk.
This commit and the following commit ("dm: take care to copy the space
map roots before locking the superblock") fix a bug associated with (b).
When committing it was possible for the superblock to still be written
in spite of an io error occurring during the preceeding metadata flush.
With these commits we're careful not to take the write lock out on the
superblock until after the metadata flush has completed.
Change the transaction manager's semantics for dm_tm_commit() to assume
all data has been flushed _before_ the single superblock that is passed
in.
As a prerequisite, split the block manager's block unlocking and
flushing by simplifying dm_bm_flush_and_unlock() to dm_bm_flush(). Now
the unlocking must be done separately.
This issue was discovered by forcing io errors at the crucial time
using dm-flakey.
Signed-off-by: Joe Thornber <ejt@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org
Tidy the transaction manager creation functions.
They no longer lock the superblock. Superblock locking is pulled out to
the caller.
Also export dm_bm_write_lock_zero.
Signed-off-by: Joe Thornber <ejt@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Alasdair G Kergon <agk@redhat.com>
The persistent-data library offers a re-usable framework for the storage
and management of on-disk metadata in device-mapper targets.
It's used by the thin-provisioning target in the next patch and in an
upcoming hierarchical storage target.
For further information, please read
Documentation/device-mapper/persistent-data.txt
Signed-off-by: Joe Thornber <thornber@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Mike Snitzer <snitzer@redhat.com>
Signed-off-by: Alasdair G Kergon <agk@redhat.com>
Joe Thornber
Joe Thornber