[gpfsug-discuss] Odd behavior with cat followed by grep.
Aaron Knister
aaron.s.knister at nasa.gov
Wed Feb 14 17:51:04 GMT 2018
Just speculating here (also known as making things up) but I wonder if
grep is somehow using the file's size in its determination of binary
status. I also see mmap in the strace so maybe there's some issue with
mmap where some internal GPFS buffer is getting truncated
inappropriately but leaving a bunch of null values which gets returned
to grep.
-Aaron
On 2/14/18 10:21 AM, John Hanks wrote:
> Hi Valdis,
>
> I tired with the grep replaced with 'ls -ls' and 'md5sum', I don't think
> this is a data integrity issue, thankfully:
>
> $ ./pipetestls.sh
> 256 -rw-r--r-- 1 39073 3001 530721 Feb 14 07:16
> /srv/gsfs0/projects/pipetest.tmp.txt
> 0 -rw-r--r-- 1 39073 3953 530721 Feb 14 07:16 /home/griznog/pipetest.tmp.txt
>
> $ ./pipetestmd5.sh
> 15cb81a85c9e450bdac8230309453a0a /srv/gsfs0/projects/pipetest.tmp.txt
> 15cb81a85c9e450bdac8230309453a0a /home/griznog/pipetest.tmp.txt
>
> And replacing grep with 'file' even properly sees the files as ASCII:
> $ ./pipetestfile.sh
> /srv/gsfs0/projects/pipetest.tmp.txt: ASCII text, with very long lines
> /home/griznog/pipetest.tmp.txt: ASCII text, with very long lines
>
> I'll poke a little harder at grep next and see what the difference in
> strace of each reveals.
>
> Thanks,
>
> jbh
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, Feb 14, 2018 at 7:08 AM, <valdis.kletnieks at vt.edu
> <mailto:valdis.kletnieks at vt.edu>> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 14 Feb 2018 06:20:32 -0800, John Hanks said:
>
> > # ls -aln /srv/gsfs0/projects/pipetest.tmp.txt $HOME/pipetest.tmp.txt
> > -rw-r--r-- 1 39073 3953 530721 Feb 14 06:10 /home/griznog/pipetest.tmp.txt
> > -rw-r--r-- 1 39073 3001 530721 Feb 14 06:10
> > /srv/gsfs0/projects/pipetest.tmp.txt
> >
> > We can "fix" the user case that exposed this by not using a temp file or
> > inserting a sleep, but I'd still like to know why GPFS is behaving this way
> > and make it stop.
>
> May be related to replication, or other behind-the-scenes behavior.
>
> Consider this example - 4.2.3.6, data and metadata replication both
> set to 2, 2 sites 95 cable miles apart, each is 3 Dell servers with
> a full
> fiberchannel mesh to 3 Dell MD34something arrays.
>
> % dd if=/dev/zero bs=1k count=4096 of=sync.test; ls -ls sync.test;
> sleep 5; ls -ls sync.test; sleep 5; ls -ls sync.test
> 4096+0 records in
> 4096+0 records out
> 4194304 bytes (4.2 MB) copied, 0.0342852 s, 122 MB/s
> 2048 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4194304 Feb 14 09:35 sync.test
> 8192 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4194304 Feb 14 09:35 sync.test
> 8192 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 4194304 Feb 14 09:35 sync.test
>
> Notice that the first /bin/ls shouldn't be starting until after the
> dd has
> completed - at which point it's only allocated half the blocks
> needed to hold
> the 4M of data at one site. 5 seconds later, it's allocated the
> blocks at both
> sites and thus shows the full 8M needed for 2 copies.
>
> I've also seen (but haven't replicated it as I write this) a small
> file (4-8K
> or so) showing first one full-sized block, then a second full-sized
> block, and
> then dropping back to what's needed for 2 1/32nd fragments. That had me
> scratching my head
>
> Having said that, that's all metadata fun and games, while your case
> appears to have some problems with data integrity (which is a whole lot
> scarier). It would be *really* nice if we understood the problem here.
>
> The scariest part is:
>
> > The first grep | wc -l returns 1, because grep outputs "Binary file /path/to/
> > gpfs/mount/test matches"
>
> which seems to be implying that we're failing on semantic consistency.
> Basically, your 'cat' command is completing and closing the file,
> but then a
> temporally later open of the same find is reading something other
> that only the
> just-written data. My first guess is that it's a race condition
> similar to the
> following: The cat command is causing a write on one NSD server, and
> the first
> grep results in a read from a *different* NSD server, returning the
> data that
> *used* to be in the block because the read actually happens before
> the first
> NSD server actually completes the write.
>
> It may be interesting to replace the grep's with pairs of 'ls -ls /
> dd' commands to grab the
> raw data and its size, and check the following:
>
> 1) does the size (both blocks allocated and logical length) reported by
> ls match the amount of data actually read by the dd?
>
> 2) Is the file length as actually read equal to the written length,
> or does it
> overshoot and read all the way to the next block boundary?
>
> 3) If the length is correct, what's wrong with the data that's
> telling grep that
> it's a binary file? ( od -cx is your friend here).
>
> 4) If it overshoots, is the remainder all-zeros (good) or does it
> return semi-random
> "what used to be there" data (bad, due to data exposure issues)?
>
> (It's certainly not the most perplexing data consistency issue I've
> hit in 4 decades - the
> winner *has* to be a intermittent data read corruption on a GPFS 3.5
> cluster that
> had us, IBM, SGI, DDN, and at least one vendor of networking gear
> all chasing our
> tails for 18 months before we finally tracked it down. :)
>
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--
Aaron Knister
NASA Center for Climate Simulation (Code 606.2)
Goddard Space Flight Center
(301) 286-2776
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