Re: [PATCH 0/2] dm mpath: Interface for explicit probing of active paths

[Martin Wilck <mwilck@suse.com>]

On Tue, 2025-05-13 at 10:00 +0200, Martin Wilck wrote:

> 

> > If you think it does, is there another reason why you didn't try
> > this
> > before?
> 
> It didn't occur to me back then that we could fail paths without
> retrying in the kernel.
> 
> Perhaps we could have the sg driver pass the blk_status_t (which is
> available on the sg level) to device mapper somehow in the sg_io_hdr
> structure? That way we could entirely avoid the layering violation
> between SCSI and dm. Not sure if that would be acceptible to
> Christoph,
> as blk_status_t is supposed to be exclusive to the kernel. Can we
> find
> a way to make sure it's passed to DM, but not to user space?

I have to correct myself. I was confused by my old patches which
contain special casing for SG_IO. The current upstream code does of
course not support special-casing SG_IO in any way. device-mapper
neither looks at the ioctl `cmd` value nor at any arguments, and has
only the Unix error code to examine when the ioctl returns. The device
mapper layer has access to *less* information than the user space
process that issued the ioctl. Adding hooks to the sg driver wouldn't
buy us anything in this situation.

If we can't change this, we can't fail paths in the SG_IO error code
path, end of story.

With Kevin's patch 1/2 applied, it would in principle be feasible to
special-case SG_IO, handle it in the dm-multipath, retrieve the
blk_status_t somehow, and possibly initiate path failover. This way
we'd at least keep the generic dm layer clean of SCSI specific code.
But still, the end result would look very similar attempt from 2021 and
would therefore lead us nowhere, probably.

I'm still not too fond of DM_MPATH_PROBE_PATHS_CMD, but I can't offer a
better solution at this time. If the side issues are fixed, it will be
an improvement over the current upstream, situation where we can do no
path failover at all.

In the long term, we should evaluate alternatives. If my conjecture in
my previous post is correct we need only PRIN/PROUT commands, there
might be a better solution than scsi-block for our customers. Using
regular block IO should actually also improved performance.

Regards
Martin