Hi,

While working on improvements w.r.t. open-iscsi userspace package in
Debian, I've stumbled upon a weird kernel bug in recent kernel
versions that makes the iSCSI initiator unusable.

The test setup is quite simple: LIO target running on the host with
fileio backend (I tried both Debian Jessie host with 3.16 kernel and
Ubuntu 15.04 host with 3.19 kernel, no difference), initiator
running inside a libvirt/KVM instance (Debian sid); nothing special
about the setup otherwise. (The target itself shows no problems.)

iSCSI login works perfectly fine, reading data from the iSCSI shows
no problems otherwise; writing small amounts of data to the iSCSI
device also works fine. But writing a bit more at once to the iSCSI
device will cause I/O errors in the kernel.

Sample messages:

[   21.473911] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] tag#3 FAILED Result: hostbyte=DID_OK 
driverbyte=DRIVER_SENSE
[   21.473914] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] tag#3 Sense Key : Not Ready [current] 
[   21.473916] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] tag#3 Add. Sense: Logical unit communication 
failure
[   21.473917] sd 2:0:0:0: [sda] tag#3 CDB: Write(10) 2a 00 00 38 15 d8 00 20 
28 00
[   21.473918] blk_update_request: I/O error, dev sda, sector 3675608
[   21.473939] EXT4-fs warning (device sda1): ext4_end_bio:329: I/O error -5 
writing to inode 46 (offset 50331648 size 4214784 starting block 459707)
[   21.473941] Buffer I/O error on device sda1, logical block 457403

This is obviously a kernel problem, as using Debian Jessie's 3.16
kernel with the same userland will work perfectly fine and not
produce any I/O errors, but with more recent kernels this is
trivially reproducible for me.

I had reported this in the Debian bugtracker against the kernel a
while ago, and somebody mentioned that this problem should have been
fixed in 4.4, but once I got around to testing 4.4, I can still
reproduce that problem. Just now I tried to use the current upstream
Linux git branch (basically 4.5-rc1 + the things that Linus already
pulled since then as of writing this email) and the problem still
persists.

The Debian bugreport can be found under:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=805252
Further details, including more log messages, can be found there.

I'm not an expert on the block device driver subsystem in the kernel,
so I don't really know where to start debugging this, so any help
would be appreciated.

Thank you.

Regards,
Christian

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