Bug 277271 - O(n^2) blkdev scanning makes bootup intorelably slow (looks like frozen) in some configurations
Summary: O(n^2) blkdev scanning makes bootup intorelably slow (looks like frozen) in s...
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: mkinitrd
Version: 10
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
medium
high
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Peter Jones
QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance
URL:
Whiteboard:
: 353391 (view as bug list)
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2007-09-04 19:58 UTC by Alexandre Oliva
Modified: 2009-12-18 05:58 UTC (History)
5 users (show)

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2009-12-18 05:58:12 UTC
Type: ---
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)
Patch that speeds up mkblkdevs on my (running) desktop from 19.5 down to 4 minutes (4.17 KB, patch)
2007-10-15 02:04 UTC, Alexandre Oliva
no flags Details | Diff

Description Alexandre Oliva 2007-09-04 19:58:52 UTC
Description of problem:
With 4 SCSI disks with 15 partitions each, grouping each pair into a RAID 1
device, almost all of them turned into an LVM physical volume, all of them used
in logical volumes, mkblkdevs takes in excess of 30 seconds, resume has taken
several minutes without completing and, arranging for that to be skipped (by
tweaking the init script), it's mkrootdev that takes forever then.

To give you an idea of how bad the situation is, I took an strace output for
mkblkdevs run on an already-running system, and watch how the line numbers
corresponding to the first visit of each device grow at O(n^2).  Can't we use
some linear algorithm here?

275:open("/sys/block/sde/dev", O_RDONLY|0x80000 /* O_??? */) = 5
475:open("/sys/block/sde/sde1/dev", O_RDONLY|0x80000 /* O_??? */) = 6
544:open("/sys/block/md30/dev", O_RDONLY|0x80000 /* O_??? */) = 5
685:open("/sys/block/dm-6/dev", O_RDONLY|0x80000 /* O_??? */) = 5
719:open("/dev/mapper/control", O_RDWR)     = 5
750:open("/sys/block/sde/slaves", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_DIRECTORY|0x80000) = 6
986:open("/sys/block/dm-5/dev", O_RDONLY|0x80000 /* O_??? */) = 6
1545:open("/sys/block/dm-4/dev", O_RDONLY|0x80000 /* O_??? */) = 6
2474:open("/sys/block/dm-3/dev", O_RDONLY|0x80000 /* O_??? */) = 6
4115:open("/sys/block/dm-2/dev", O_RDONLY|0x80000 /* O_??? */) = 6
6486:open("/sys/block/dm-1/dev", O_RDONLY|0x80000 /* O_??? */) = 6
9308:open("/sys/block/dm-0/dev", O_RDONLY|0x80000 /* O_??? */) = 6
12617:open("/sys/block/md29/dev", O_RDONLY|0x80000 /* O_??? */) = 6
18373:open("/sys/block/md28/dev", O_RDONLY|0x80000 /* O_??? */) = 6
25312:open("/sys/block/md27/dev", O_RDONLY|0x80000 /* O_??? */) = 6
33542:open("/sys/block/md26/dev", O_RDONLY|0x80000 /* O_??? */) = 6
43171:open("/sys/block/md25/dev", O_RDONLY|0x80000 /* O_??? */) = 6
53821:open("/sys/block/md24/dev", O_RDONLY|0x80000 /* O_??? */) = 6
66014:open("/sys/block/md23/dev", O_RDONLY|0x80000 /* O_??? */) = 6
79858:open("/sys/block/md22/dev", O_RDONLY|0x80000 /* O_??? */) = 6
95461:open("/sys/block/md21/dev", O_RDONLY|0x80000 /* O_??? */) = 6
115829:open("/sys/block/md20/dev", O_RDONLY|0x80000 /* O_??? */) = 6
141746:open("/sys/block/md19/dev", O_RDONLY|0x80000 /* O_??? */) = 6
167353:open("/sys/block/md18/dev", O_RDONLY|0x80000 /* O_??? */) = 6
197347:open("/sys/block/md17/dev", O_RDONLY|0x80000 /* O_??? */) = 6
227903:open("/sys/block/md16/dev", O_RDONLY|0x80000 /* O_??? */) = 6
262117:open("/sys/block/md15/dev", O_RDONLY|0x80000 /* O_??? */) = 6
296839:open("/sys/block/md14/dev", O_RDONLY|0x80000 /* O_??? */) = 6

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
nash-6.0.14-1.fc8.x86_64

Comment 1 Peter Jones 2007-09-07 21:44:20 UTC
Yep, this algorithm totally sucks.

Comment 2 Alexandre Oliva 2007-10-05 21:30:59 UTC
Aren't there plans to fix this?  It makes it impossible to boot Fedora up after
installation on any reasonably-configured LVM/RAID configuration that is planned
for growth without a need for at least doubling the disk capacity (which is what
leads to the large number of partitions and raid devices).  Likewise, any system
with root on an volume group with a large number (tens) of logical volumes will
take hours to boot up.  This is unacceptable, and it's silly to wait until RHEL
customers run into this before fixing it.  It is a major regression that makes
Fedora 8 unusable for any sizable host for virtual machines.  Can we please make
this a blocker, or at least add a note to the release notes?

(FWIW, the algorithm is not just O(n^2).  At least one part of it is O(n^3), and
I get the impression that there's another O(n) on top of that.

Unfortunately, I've been traveling too much and I've been unable to set aside
the time to figure out what changed that made it so bad, but I think caching the
result of is_sysfs_slave(), which is where almost all of the time is spent,
could significantly speed things up.

Comment 3 Alexandre Oliva 2007-10-15 02:04:29 UTC
Created attachment 226841 [details]
Patch that speeds up mkblkdevs on my (running) desktop from 19.5 down to 4 minutes

Here's a patch that shaves off a *huge* amount of system time from mkblkdevs
and presumably other nash boot-time operations.  It's still too slow, at 4
minutes just for mkblkdevs (compared with nearly nothing back in
mkinitrd-6.0.9), but it's better than a system that will take hours to boot up.

Comment 4 Alexandre Oliva 2007-11-10 15:27:17 UTC
I see it didn't make F8 :-(  That's unfortunate.

Anyhow...  Do we even need all this slave-device scanning to boot up?  I can't
quite see a reason to not just skip this pointless exercise then.  Of course we
want that to configure the boot up and see what drivers we need, but to actually
boot up and create the device nodes, the dependencies are not important, are they?

Comment 5 Alexandre Oliva 2008-03-13 06:19:45 UTC
*** Bug 353391 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 6 Alexandre Oliva 2008-04-05 07:26:04 UTC
Still no change for F-9 :-(

Comment 7 Bug Zapper 2008-05-14 03:11:04 UTC
Changing version to '9' as part of upcoming Fedora 9 GA.
More information and reason for this action is here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping

Comment 8 Bug Zapper 2008-11-26 01:58:55 UTC
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 10 development cycle.
Changing version to '10'.

More information and reason for this action is here:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping

Comment 9 Peter Jones 2009-02-17 19:50:44 UTC
(In reply to comment #3)
> Created an attachment (id=226841) [details]

Applied.

Comment 10 Alexandre Oliva 2009-05-23 13:35:04 UTC
Thanks for taking the patch.  Unfortunately, I eventually folded and reorganized my disk partitioning to work around this bug, so I can't test the effectivity of this change any more.  Regardless, even after manually applying the fix myself, mkinitrd and boot-up were still intolerably slow, at a mere ~80 block devices, and it was not because of lvm :-(

Comment 11 Bug Zapper 2009-11-18 07:52:44 UTC
This message is a reminder that Fedora 10 is nearing its end of life.
Approximately 30 (thirty) days from now Fedora will stop maintaining
and issuing updates for Fedora 10.  It is Fedora's policy to close all
bug reports from releases that are no longer maintained.  At that time
this bug will be closed as WONTFIX if it remains open with a Fedora 
'version' of '10'.

Package Maintainer: If you wish for this bug to remain open because you
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Comment 12 Bug Zapper 2009-12-18 05:58:12 UTC
Fedora 10 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2009-12-17. Fedora 10 is 
no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further 
security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug.

If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of 
Fedora please feel free to reopen this bug against that version.

Thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed.


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