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A non-responsive scsi target that "black hole"s commands leads to full scsi recovery logic, which includes sending TURs at various stages and waiting for timeouts. This process may take a long time, and it blocks dm-mp failover for multiple minutes, which may easily exceed an important application timeout (such as an Oracle voting disk). In a typical scenario, the net-net is a customer who goes through the expense of implementing a dual-fabric, fully redundant storage environment sees the environment not failover as expected in the case of such a "black hole" or "slow draining" target, and thus, the expensive redundancy they paid for does not work. Steps to Reproduce: Configure a scsi target setup so that commands are silently dropped, but no transport or other error is reported (all commands timeout). One way to do this is with scsi_debug. Actual results: scsi recovery logic can take many minutes to complete, which blocks dm-mp from failing over to another path, and renders expensive dual fabric setups ineffective. Expected results: scsi error recovery, and thus, dm-mp, should complete in a reasonable amount of time so that application timeouts (such as oracle voting disk) do not get triggered if the "black hole" target type failure occurs. Additional info: David Jeffery has started a patchset which will address this issue and posted it to linux-scsi: http://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-scsi/msg51090.html
Created attachment 488905 [details] Reduce # of turs sent during scsi error recovery Attached is a RHEL6 version of the patch which as be submitted (but not yet accepted) upstream.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 672437 ***
Re-opening to track this specific case separately, as BZ 672437 is more general.
This request was evaluated by Red Hat Product Management for inclusion in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux maintenance release. Product Management has requested further review of this request by Red Hat Engineering, for potential inclusion in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Update release for currently deployed products. This request is not yet committed for inclusion in an Update release.
Thanks for your work on this David. Patch was sent to rh-kernel for review and merging.
Patch(es) available on kernel-2.6.32-171.el6
Technical note added. If any revisions are required, please edit the "Technical Notes" field accordingly. All revisions will be proofread by the Engineering Content Services team. New Contents: In error recovery, most SCSI error recovery stages send a TUR (Test Unit Ready) command for every bad command when a driver error handler reports success. When several bad commands pointed to a same device, the device was probed multiple times. When the device was in a state where the device did not respond to commands even after a recovery function returned success, the error handler had to wait for the commands to time out. This significantly impeded the recovery process. With this update, SCSI mid-layer error routines to send test commands have been fixed to respond once per device instead of once per bad command, thus reducing error recovery time considerably.
Since the problem described in this bug report should be resolved in a recent advisory, it has been closed with a resolution of ERRATA. For information on the advisory, and where to find the updated files, follow the link below. If the solution does not work for you, open a new bug report. http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2011-1530.html
*** Bug 631765 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***