[rrd-developers] bus error when disk is full, with mmap & sparse file

[Tobias Oetiker]

Hi Francois,

Yesterday Francois-Xavier Bourlet wrote:

> Hello,
>
> On my system rrd_open use mmap and my system support sparse file.
> That's mean when my disk get full rdd_open can bus error. Here's the
> scenario in rrd_open:
>
> Disk really close to full, few kbytes free
> open file -> ok
> seek to end -1 -> ok
> write 1 -> ok
> the system will only write the last chunk of the file, every others
> will be allocated lazily later because of the sparse file feature.
> So we have a file bigger than the free space available on the system.
> Next attempt to write on this file, even without extending the size of
> it will fail with a disk full error.
>
> next rrd_open map the file and then
> memset to zero the whole file... leading to a buserror since the
> kernel can't write into the file because the filesystem is full.

this happens at create time, right ?

> In my case I just have to extend the disk space available and it's
> fine. But the problem is you don't have any clue that the bus error
> happen because you're disk is full, and I really wasted a lots of time
> before I thought simply checking the free space...
>
> I don't really now how to fix the code, maybe we can catch SIGBUS
> signals, and when discovering that the error is about a file mapping,
> provide an human readable message on terminal/log?
>
> Trying to recover from a bus error on file mapped memory seem to be
> another challenge...
>
> Or rather than memsetting the file to zero, we could simply write
> zeros in the file before mapping it, and so it would be easy to catch
> write error.

> Let me know what do you think about it, I am available to patch rrd
> with the best proposed solution.

how about a cal to statvfs before starting the whole creation
process ? (for win32 this would bprobably be GetDiskFreeSpaceEx)

cheers
tobi



>
> Regards,
>

-- 
Tobi Oetiker, OETIKER+PARTNER AG, Aarweg 15 CH-4600 Olten, Switzerland
http://it.oetiker.ch tobi at oetiker.ch ++41 62 775 9902 / sb: -9900