Date: Sun, 18 Dec 2011 19:59:13 -0500 (EST) From: Rick Macklem <rmacklem@uoguelph.ca> To: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Cc: John <jwd@slowblink.com> Subject: NFS client UDP retransmit timer busted for 8.n/9.n (patch) Message-ID: <255844377.375232.1324256353832.JavaMail.root@erie.cs.uoguelph.ca>
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Thanks to recent detective work done by jwd@, a problem w.r.t. retransmit timeouts for UDP mounts (both old and new NFS clients) has been identified. The kernel rpc has two timeouts for UDP: 1 - a timeout that causes the RPC request to be retransmitted on the same socket, using the same xid. This one defaults to 3seconds and can be set via CLSET_RETRY_TIMEOUT. (This is always the default of 3seconds for FreeBSD currently.) 2 - a timeout that cause the socket to be destroyed and a fresh one created. The request is then sent on this new socket, with a different xid. The problem with #2 is that the retransmitted RPC request will miss a server's Duplicate Request Cache (DRC), because of the different xid. As such, #2 should be much larger than #1. However, #2 defaults to 1second (ie. smaller than #1->trouble!) One way to avoid this problem is to set #2 to a much larger value via the "timeout=<value>" mount option. (Btw, the <value> is in 1/10 seconds, so "timeout="600" sets it to 60sec.) I now have a patch that I believe deals with this correctly. It sets #1 to the "timeout=<value>" (default 1second) and #2 to a much larger value. (#2 timeouts are what the kernel rpc counts as retries, so for "soft" mounts, I set #2 to "nm_retry * nm_timeout / 2" and "retries = 2", so that it fails after "nm_retry * nm_timeout", which I think is the correct semantics.) This patch is attached and is also available at: http://people.freebsd.org/~rmacklem/udp-timer.patch (jwd@, this patch is updated from what I emailed you, so you probably want it:-) In summary, if you are using NFS mounts over UDP on FreeBSD8 or 9 systems, you either want to use "timeout=600" or try the patch. You are pretty badly broken otherwise. Hopefully, this patch can make it into -current/head soon, rick ps: jhb@, could you maybe review this, thanks, rick.
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