Re: Q: cat /proc/mdstat blocking?

From: Al Viro
Date: Fri Aug 05 2011 - 11:23:43 EST


On Fri, Aug 05, 2011 at 02:02:49PM +0200, Ulrich Windl wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I thought that /proc/mdstat just displays the current state of the MD RAIDs, not querying them, thus never blocking. Unfortunately I could observer a "cat /proc/mdstat" hanging for several seconds when one of the RAID1 legs was unavailable and multipathd was queueing requests to the leg.
>
> Practically this makes monitoring of the other RAIDs difficult when one bad device is enough to block /proc/mdstat.
>
> Now my question: Does it work as designed (i.e. as intended), or is this not as intended?

I suspect that something is holding all_mddevs_lock too long; that, or one
of the subdrivers' spinlocks. Try to find out what it blocks on and what
holds the lock in question...
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