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Date:      Wed, 3 Nov 2004 19:25:45 +0300 (MSK)
From:      Igor Sysoev <is@rambler-co.ru>
To:        Uwe Doering <gemini@geminix.org>
Cc:        stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: vnode_pager_putpages errors and DOS?
Message-ID:  <20041103191641.K63546@is.park.rambler.ru>
In-Reply-To: <4168578F.7060706@geminix.org>
References:  <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1041009150440.93055O-100000@fledge.watson.org> <4168578F.7060706@geminix.org>

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On Sat, 9 Oct 2004, Uwe Doering wrote:

> Robert Watson wrote:
> > On Fri, 8 Oct 2004, Steve Shorter wrote:
> >
> >>>	I have some machines that run customers cgi stuff.
> >>>These machines have started to hang and become unresponsive.
> >>>At first I thought it was a hardware issue, but I discovered in
> >>>a cyclades log the following stuff that got logged to the
> >>>console which explains the cause of the system hangs/failures.
> >>>
> >>>vnode_pager_putpages: residual I/O 65536 at 347
> >>>vnode_pager_putpages: I/O error 28]
> >>>vnode_pager_putpages: residual I/O 65536 at 285]
> >>
> >>	Aha! also at the same time I get in syslog
> >>
> >>	/kernel: pid 6 (syncer), uid 0 on /chroot/tmp: file system full
> >>
> >>	Whats happening? Can a full filesystem bring the thing down?
> >>Ideas? Fixes?
> >
> > Ideally not, but many UNIX programs respond poorly to being out of memory
> > and disk space ("No space, wot?").  Are you using a swap file, and if so,
> > how did you create the swapfile?  Are you using sparse files much?
>
> I wonder whether the unresponsiveness is actually just the result of the
> kernel spending most of the time in printf(), generating warning
> messages.  vnode_pager_generic_putpages() doesn't return any error in
> case of a write failure, so the caller (syncer in this case) isn't aware
> that the paging out failed, that is, it is supposed to carry on as if
> nothing happened.
>
> So how about limiting the number of warnings to one per second?  UFS has
> similar code in order to curb "file system full" and the like.  Please
> consider trying the attached patch, which applies cleanly to 4-STABLE.
> It won't make the actual application causing these errors any happier,
> but it may eliminate the DoS aspect of the issue.

I have just tried your patch. To test I ran the program from
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=kern/67919

The patch allows me to login on machine while the system reports about
"vnode_pager_putpages: I/O error 28". However, the file system access is
very limited and after some time the system became unresponsible.


Igor Sysoev
http://sysoev.ru/en/



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