Wouter Verhelst wrote:
> Hi Paul,
> 
> Recently (that is, a few months ago), I did some initramfs hooks for
> Debian to allow the root filesystem to be on an NBD device. They work
> well, but Vagrant Cascadian (who maintains LTSP in Debian, which can
> optionally use NBD for quite a few things) pointed out one issue with
> this: when the system shuts down, there's no point in which userspace
> can safely issue an nbd disconnect message to the kernel anymore. As
> such, you rely on the TCP keepalive probes, which on a server serving
> for a high amount of clients (as is common in LTSP environments) might
> be problematic. Userspace can't do this, because that'd mean both
> poweroff and nbd-client would need to be the very last command issued in
> the shutdown sequence (running either makes doing the other impossible),
> so that's a non-option.

Sounds reasonable to me. I'm not sure I understand the need to 
disconnect though. What is the issue that occurs if you don't disconnect?

> As such, I thought it'd make sense to have the NBD kernel module do so.
> Since the software-RAID subsystems seems to do a final sync right before
> a system poweroff occurs, I presume there's support in the kernel to
> hook into the poweroff sequence, and do some final cleanup operation. If
> NBD could hook into that and at that point just send an NBD_DISCONNECT
> message to the server, that would solve this issue.

Yes, there is a hook that md, for example, uses to stop all md devices 
at shutdown time.

Shouldn't be hard to get nbd to use that.

--
Paul


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