Files
scoutfs/kmod
Zach Brown 8e34c5d66a Use quorum slots and background election work
Previously quorum configuration specified the number of votes needed to
elected the leader.  This was an excessive amount of freedom in the
configuration of the cluster which created all sorts of problems which
had to be designed around.

Most acutely, though, it required a probabilistic mechanism for mounts
to persistently record that they're starting a server so that future
servers could find and possibly fence them.  They would write to a lot
of quorum blocks and trust that it was unlikely that future servers
would overwrite all of their written blocks.  Overwriting was always
possible, which would be bad enough, but it also required so much IO
that we had to use long election timeouts to avoid spurious fencing.
These longer timeouts had already gone wrong on some storage
configurations, leading to hung mounts.

To fix this and other problems we see coming, like live membership
changes, we now specifically configure the number and identity of mounts
which will be participating in quorum voting.  With specific identities,
mounts now have a corresponding specific block they can write to and
which future servers can read from to see if they're still running.

We change the quorum config in the super block from a single
quorum_count to an array of quorum slots which specify the address of
the mount that is assigned to that slot.  The mount argument to specify
a quorum voter changes from "server_addr=$addr" to "quorum_slot_nr=$nr"
which specifies the mount's slot.  The slot's address is used for udp
election messages and tcp server connections.

Now that we specifically have configured unique IP addresses for all the
quorum members, we can use UDP messages to send and receive the vote
mesages in the raft protocol to elect a leader.  The quorum code doesn't
have to read and write disk block votes and is a more reasonable core
loop that either waits for received network messages or timeouts to
advance the raft election state machine.

The quorum blocks are now used for slots to store their persistent raft
term and to set their leader state.  We have event fields in the block
to record the timestamp of the most recent interesting events that
happened to the slot.

Now that raft doesn't use IO, we can leave the quorum election work
running in the background.  The raft work in the quorum members is
always running so we can use a much more typical raft implementation
with heartbeats.  Critically, this decouples the client and election
life cycles.  Quorum is always running and is responsible for starting
and stopping the server.  The client repeatedly tries to connect to a
server, it has nothing to do with deciding to participate in quorum.

Finally, we add a quorum/status sysfs file which shows the state of the
quorum raft protocol in a member mount and has the last messages that
were sent to or received from the other members.

Signed-off-by: Zach Brown <zab@versity.com>
2021-02-18 12:57:30 -08:00
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