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Re: Nova compute manager: trying to understand rationale for kpartx atop qemu-nbd

 

That seems like a reasonable approach.  Would be nice to work with packagers to verify that the packages are properly installing nbd.  I'm pretty sure i used kpartx because i didn't know about the max_part parameter.

Vish

On May 2, 2012, at 11:37 AM, Lee Schermerhorn wrote:

> With diablo plus some of our own changes, we've discovered our compute
> nodes in some of our test nova environments are littered with
> orphaned /dev/mapper/nbd* links to /dev/dm-* devices that are holding
> the respective nbd devices.  Of course, this causes injection failure
> for VMs that attempt to reuse those wedged nbd devices that appear
> available by the method that nova uses to determine nbd device
> availability.
> 
> This could well be self-inflicted, and we haven't gotten down to the
> root cause.  However, in looking at it, we're wondering why the compute
> manager uses kpartx, specifically atop nbd device.  It does appear to be
> rather fragile and nbd devices do support partitioned images if the
> module is installed with max_part > 0, where zero is the unfortunate
> default.
> 
> We're thinking that maybe we can dispense with kpartx and, ensuring that
> the nbd module is installed with max_part > 0 on our compute nodes, use
> the resulting /dev/nbdXpY devices directly.   But, before we charge off
> down that path, we want to understand the rationale for using kpartx
> atop nbd.  We've searched the wiki and git logs and the wider 'net for
> enlightenment.  Finding none, we turn to the collective wisdom of the
> Community.
> 
> Is there some problem with qemu-nbd and partitioned images that argues
> against this approach?  Perhaps qemu-nbd doesn't recognize/support all
> of the partition table types that kpartx does?  Something more
> insidious?
> 
> Anyone know?
> 
> Regards,
> Lee Schermerhorn
> 
> 
> 
> 
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