Re: [patch] zfs livelock and thread priorities

On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 04:52:23PM -0400, Ben Kelly wrote:

  On Apr 28, 2009, at 2:11 PM, Artem Belevich wrote:
  > My system had eventually deadlocked overnight, though it took much
  > longer than before to reach that point.
  >
  > In the end I've got many many processes sleeping in zio_wait with no
  > disk activity whatsoever.
  > I'm not sure if that's the same issue or not.
  >
  > Here are stack traces for all processes -- http://pastebin.com/f364e1452
  > I've got the core saved, so if you want me to dig out some more info,
  > let me know if/how I could help.
  
  It looks like there is a possible deadlock between zfs_zget() and  
  zfs_zinactive().  They both acquire a lock via ZFS_OBJ_HOLD_ENTER().   
  The zfs_zinactive() path can get called indirectly from within  
  zio_done().  The zfs_zget() can in turn block waiting for zio_done()'s  
  completion while holding the object lock.
  
  The following patch might help:
  
     http://www.wanderview.com/svn/public/misc/zfs/zfs_zinactive_deadlock.diff
  
  This simply bails out of the inactive processing if the object lock is  
  already held.  I'm not sure if this is 100% correct or not as it  
  cannot verify there are references to the vnode.  I also tried  
  executing the zfs_zinactive() logic in a taskqueue to avoid the  
  deadlock, but that caused other deadlocks to occur.
  
  Hope that helps.
  
  - Ben

Its my understanding that the deadlock was fixed in -current,
how does that affect the usefulness of the thread priorities
patch?  Should I continue testing it or is it effectively a 
NOOP now?  

Also, I've been doing some fairly intense testing of zfs in 
recent -current and I am tracking down a situation where 
performance gets worse but I think I found a workaround.
I am gathering more data regarding the cause, workaround,
symptoms, and originating commit and will post about it soon.