Re: [Xen-devel] domU oom -> xvda1 read-only without any notice?

[Josip Rodin <joy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Mar 31, 2010 at 09:45:01AM +0100, Keir Fraser wrote:
> >> Blkback communicates this kind of info to blkfront via a node in xenstore
> >> named 'info'. Bit 2 of this numeric field indicates if a virtual disc is
> >> read-only. I think it's more likely that the domU has internally confused
> >> itself, rather than being told to mount read-only by dom0 -- the flags get
> >> probed when the virtual disc first appears, and I don't think would get
> >> probed again after that anyway without a full disc hot-unplug/replug.
> > 
> > OK, thanks, so is there any way I could examine xen-blkfront then? :)
> > I looked around and only found funny bits like:
> > 
> > % cat /sys/module/xen_blkfront/drivers/xen:vbd/vbd-51713/block/xvda1/ro
> > 0
> 
> AFAIK that means that the read-only-ness is not being propagated up to domU
> block layer by the xen_blockfront driver. I'm not sure exactly what other
> possibilities there are, but if the kernel has been OOMing processes then
> perhaps you're in a runlevel or mode, or even a kenrel bug, in which rootfs
> is forced read-only for other reasons? There have been bugs around OOM in
> the past, and really it's a kernel path that's obviously best avoided! Any
> idea why the OOM occurred in the first place?

Not really. It's prompted by a skipfish (web security scanner) run on the
web server on the same machine, and that server has PHP that talks to the
database. It does nicely for a few hours, then it bursts into flames. The
2.6.26 domU kernel reliably died completely in that situation, it's that SMP
bug with the old forward-ported Xen patches. The new kernel survived some
OOM situations, and obviously some others not so much :) This is the first
time I saw it break blkfront, so I figured it may be useful to report early
in case I can gather some more debug info now.

If nobody has any immediate suggestions as to what to do, I'm going to
restart it now because we need the machine in a not-so-useless state.
But I'll probably reproduce the same problem tonight anyway.

-- 
     2. That which causes joy or happiness.

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