Ok, Gergo and I have been working through the two issues he reported
and with kind access to his machine I have figured out what is going
on. I am going to post this to the thread so we have a record of it,
because it is quite interesting.
Gergo found two problems:
(1) 'hammer reblock' can lose track of space reservations and cause
hammer_alloc_data() to run out of space on the media and panic.
I hope to fix this today. At worst we want the reblocker to
return an error if there is insufficient free space on the disk
to reblock it, not panic the machine :-).
I have found that 'dd' can do the same thing. It is the same bug.
(2) On his small 14G test partition, using nohistory, it turns out
that a huge amount of fragmentation can build up if the partition
is not reblocked. I aint talking 10% here, I'm talking 65%
fragmentation or worse. The 14G partition only had 5G worth
of files on it but it was 99% full, with only 300MB free in df.
It was so fragmented that trying to reblock it using the default
fill level (aka 'hammer reblock /home') failed because there was
not enough media space free to reblock into.
This is really a documentation issue. HAMMER partitions must be
reblocked occassionally, preferably via cron and preferably before
you actually run out of disk space.
It is possible to reblock when the media is highly fragmented. You do
it by telling hammer to only reblock nearly-empty blocks first, in
order to get them freed up and available for reuse as quickly as possible.
This is done by specifying a <fill_percentage> argument.
For example, this command will only reblock blocks that are 5% full
(and hence 95% empty):
hammer reblock /home 5
It works because it doesn't cost much to move the small amounts of data
out of those highly fragmented blocks and thus be able to free the blocks.
You then increase the fill percentage until you have freed enough space
to do the remainder with no limitations:
hammer reblock /home 25
hammer reblock /home 50
hammer reblock /home 75
hammer reblock /home 90
hammer reblock /home
whew...
It's a bit complex so what I am going to do is add some foot-shooting
protection to the 'hammer reblock' utility and maybe also have it
print out a warning, a reminder, if you attempt to reblock a hammer
partition that is too full.
-Matt
