Re: [PATCH v2 4/5] nvme-fc: Make initial connect attempt synchronous
From: James Smart
Date: Sat Jul 01 2023 - 08:11:34 EST
On 6/20/2023 6:37 AM, Daniel Wagner wrote:
Commit 4c984154efa1 ("nvme-fc: change controllers first connect to use
reconnect path") made the connection attempt asynchronous in order to
make the connection attempt from autoconnect/boot via udev/systemd up
case a bit more reliable.
Unfortunately, one side effect of this is that any wrong parameters
provided from userspace will not be directly reported as invalid, e.g.
auth keys.
So instead having the policy code inside the kernel it's better to
address this in userspace, for example in nvme-cli or nvme-stas.
This aligns the fc transport with tcp and rdma.
As much as you want to make this change to make transports "similar", I
am dead set against it unless you are completing a long qualification of
the change on real FC hardware and FC-NVME devices. There is probably
1.5 yrs of testing of different race conditions that drove this change.
You cannot declare success from a simplistic toy tool such as fcloop for
validation.
The original issues exist, probably have even morphed given the time
from the original change, and this will seriously disrupt the transport
and any downstream releases. So I have a very strong NACK on this change.
Yes - things such as the connect failure results are difficult to return
back to nvme-cli. I have had many gripes about the nvme-cli's behavior
over the years, especially on negative cases due to race conditions
which required retries. It still fails this miserably. The async
reconnect path solved many of these issues for fc.
For the auth failure, how do we deal with things if auth fails over time
as reconnects fail due to a credential changes ? I would think
commonality of this behavior drives part of the choice.
-- james