History log of /freebsd-9.3-release/sys/geom/multipath/g_multipath.h
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# 267654 19-Jun-2014 gjb

Copy stable/9 to releng/9.3 as part of the 9.3-RELEASE cycle.

Approved by: re (implicit)
Sponsored by: The FreeBSD Foundation

# 229303 02-Jan-2012 mav

MFC r227464, r227471
Major GEOM MULTIPATH class rewrite:
- Improved locking and destruction process to fix crashes.
- Improved "automatic" configuration method to make it consistent and safe
by reading metadata back from all specified paths after writing to one.
- Added provider size check to reduce chance of ordering conflict with
other GEOM classes.
- Added "manual" configuration method without using on-disk metadata.
- Added "add" and "remove" commands to allow manage paths manually.
- Failed paths are no longer dropped from geom, but only marked as FAIL
and excluded from I/O operations.
- Automatically restore failed paths when all others paths are marked
as failed, for example, because of device-caused (not transport) errors.
- Added "fail" and "restore" commands to manually control FAIL flag.
- geom is now destroyed on last path disconnection.
- Added optional Active/Active mode support. Unlike Active/Passive
mode, load evenly distributed between all working paths. If supported by
the device, it allows to significantly improve performance, utilizing
bandwidth of all paths. It is controlled by -A option during creation.
Disabled by default now.
- Improved `status` and `list` commands output.

Sponsored by: iXsystems, inc.


# 225736 22-Sep-2011 kensmith

Copy head to stable/9 as part of 9.0-RELEASE release cycle.

Approved by: re (implicit)


# 167050 27-Feb-2007 mjacob

First cut at GEOM based multipath. This is an active/passive{/passive...}
arrangement that has no intrinsic internal knowledge of whether devices
it is given are truly multipath devices. As such, this is a simplistic
approach, but still a useful one.

The basic approach is to (at present- this will change soon) use camcontrol
to find likely identical devices and and label the trailing sector of the
first one. This label contains both a full UUID and a name. The name is
what is presented in /dev/multipath, but the UUID is used as a true
distinguishor at g_taste time, thus making sure we don't have chaos
on a shared SAN where everyone names their data multipath as "Fred".

The first of N identical devices (and N *may* be 1!) becomes the active
path until a BIO request is failed with EIO or ENXIO. When this occurs,
the active disk is ripped away and the next in a list is picked to
(retry and) continue with.

During g_taste events new disks that meet the match criteria for existing
multipath geoms get added to the tail end of the list.

Thus, this active/passive setup actually does work for devices which
go away and come back, as do (now) mpt(4) and isp(4) SAN based disks.

There is still a lot to do to improve this- like about 5 of the 12
recommendations I've received about it, but it's been functional enough
for a while that it deserves a broader test base.

Reviewed by: pjd
Sponsored by: IronPort Systems
MFC: 2 months