On 9/30/20 8:01 AM, Qu Wenruo wrote:
[BUG] There are quite some bug reports of btrfs falling into a ENOSPC trap, where btrfs can't even start a transaction to add new devices.
[CAUSE] Most of the reports are utilize multi-device profiles, like RAID1/RAID10/RAID5/RAID6, and the involved disks have very unbalanced sizes.
It turns out that, the overcommit calculation in btrfs_can_overcommit() is just a factor based calculation, which can't check if devices can really fulfill the requirement for the desired profile.
This makes btrfs_can_overcommit() to be always over-confident about usable space, and when we can't allocate any new metadata chunk but still allow new metadata operations, we fall into the ENOSPC trap and have no way to exit it.
[WORKAROUND] The root fix needs a device layout aware, chunk allocator like available space calculation.
There used to be such patchset submitted to the mail list, but the extra failure mode is tricky to handle for chunk allocation, thus that patchset needs more time to mature.
Meanwhile to prevent such problems reaching more users, workaround the problem by:
Half the over-commit available space reported So that we won't always be that over-confident. But this won't really help if we have extremely unbalanced disk size.
Don't over-commit if the space info is already full This may already be too late, but still better than doing nothing and believe the over-commit values.
I just had a thought, what if we simply cap the free_chunk_space to the min of the free space of all the devices. Simply walk through all the devices on mount, and we do the initial set of whatever the smallest one is. The rest of the math would work out fine, and the rest of the modifications would work fine. The only "tricky" part would be when we do a shrink or grow, we'd have to re-calculate the sizes for everybody, but that's not a big deal. Thanks,
Josef