Re: [patch 4/5] fail-injection capability for disk IO

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Jens Axboe wrote:
On Wed, Aug 23 2006, Andrew Morton wrote:

On Wed, 23 Aug 2006 14:03:55 +0200
Jens Axboe <[email protected]> wrote:


On Wed, Aug 23 2006, Akinobu Mita wrote:

This patch provides fail-injection capability for disk IO.

Boot option:

	fail_make_request=<probability>,<interval>,<times>,<space>

	<probability>

		specifies how often it should fail in percent.

	<interval>

		specifies the interval of failures.

	<times>

		specifies how many times failures may happen at most.

	<space>

		specifies the size of free space where disk IO can be issued
		safely in bytes.

Example:

	fail_make_request=100,10,-1,0

generic_make_request() fails once per 10 times.

Hmm dunno, seems a pretty useless feature to me.

We need it.  What is the FS/VFS/VM behaviour in the presence of IO
errors?  Nobody knows, because we rarely test it.  Those few times where
people _do_ test it (the hard way), bad things tend to happen.  reiserfs
(for example) likes to go wobble, wobble, wobble, BUG.


You misunderstood me - a global parameter is useless, as it makes it
pretty impossible for people to use this for any sort of testing (unless
it's very specialized). I didn't say a feature to test io errors was
useless!


Wouldn't it make a lot
more sense to do this per-queue instead of a global entity?

Yes, I think so.  /sys/block/sda/sda2/make-it-fail.


Precisely.


I think that this is very useful for testing file systems.

What this will miss is the error path through the lower levels of the IO path (i.e., the libata/SCSI error handling confusion that Mark Lord has been working on patches for would need some error injection at or below the libata level).

We currently test this whole path with either weird fault injection gear to hit the s-ata bus or the old fashion pile of moderately flaky disks that we try hard not to fix or totally kill.

It would be really useful to get something (target mode SW disk? libata or other low level error injection?) to test this whole path in software...

ric


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