Bug 834172

Summary: Conservative merge for meta-data split-brain
Product: [Community] GlusterFS Reporter: Pranith Kumar K <pkarampu>
Component: replicateAssignee: Pranith Kumar K <pkarampu>
Status: CLOSED EOL QA Contact:
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: pre-releaseCC: bugs, gluster-bugs, jdarcy, vbellur
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Hardware: Unspecified   
OS: Unspecified   
Whiteboard: FutureFeature
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Last Closed: 2015-10-22 15:40:20 UTC Type: Bug
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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Description Pranith Kumar K 2012-06-21 06:08:49 UTC
Description of problem:

    Avati,
      What should be the behavior when there is metadata split-brain?.


While we are doing mostly the right thing in terms of detecting a syntactic conflict in meta data (and calling it "split brain"), we are doing nothing at all in terms of merging/resolving conflicts. Unlike data, there are more interesting possibilities with POSIX metadata w.r.t semantic merge/resolution. The entire problem boils down to basically two attributes - permission and ownership. Rest of the attributes are either non-modifiable as "meta data" (st_blocks, st_ctime etc.) or we don't care (e.g st_atime). We can provide a few merge policy options if we detect meta data conflict, like - "apply the most conservative permission", "apply most conservative permission ignoring the execute bit", "change ownership to owner of parent directory", "change ownership to root".

At the very least we need to support a very basic semantic merge - if copies are accidentally identical, consider the conflict resolved. And this needs to be done for both meta data and data (and possibly extended to GFID mismatch as well)
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Comment 1 Jeff Darcy 2012-10-31 13:13:53 UTC
Kind of an enhancement request, which would normally be low severity, but this seems like a pretty important thing to add.

Comment 2 Kaleb KEITHLEY 2015-10-22 15:40:20 UTC
pre-release version is ambiguous and about to be removed as a choice.

If you believe this is still a bug, please change the status back to NEW and choose the appropriate, applicable version for it.