When it deadlocks, groups stop merging and compaction group merge
backlog will run-away.
Also, graceful shutdown will be blocked on it.
Found by flaky unit test
test_merge_chooses_best_replica_with_odd_count, which timed-out in 1
in 100 runs.
Reason for deadlock:
When storage groups are merged, the main compaction group of the new
storage group takes a compaction lock, which is appended to
_compaction_reenablers_for_merging, and released when the merge
completion fiber is done with the whole batch.
If we accumulate more than 1 merge cycle for the fiber, deadlock
occurs. Lock order will be this
Initial state:
cg0: main
cg1: main
cg2: main
cg3: main
After 1st merge:
cg0': main [locked], merging_groups=[cg0.main, cg1.main]
cg1': main [locked], merging_groups=[cg2.main, cg3.main]
After 2nd merge:
cg0'': main [locked], merging_groups=[cg0'.main [locked], cg0.main, cg1.main, cg1'.main [locked], cg2.main, cg3.main]
merge completion fiber will try to stop cg0'.main, which will be
blocked on compaction lock. which is held by the reenabler in
_compaction_reenablers_for_merging, hence deadlock.
The fix is to wait for background merge to finish before we start the
next merge. It's achieved by holding old erm in the background merge,
and doing a topology barrier from the merge finalizing transition.
Background merge is supposed to be a relatively quick operation, it's
stopping compaction groups. So may wait for active requests. It
shouldn't prolong the barrier indefinitely.
Tablet tests which trigger merge need to be adjusted to call the
barrier, otherwise they will be vulnerable to the deadlock.
Fixes SCYLLADB-928
Backport to >= 2025.4 because it's the earliest vulnerable due to f9021777d8.
Closesscylladb/scylladb#29007
* github.com:scylladb/scylladb:
tablets: Fix deadlock in background storage group merge fiber
replica: table: Propagate old erm to storage group merge
test: boost: tablets_test: Save tablet metadata when ACKing split resize decision
storage_service: Extract local_topology_barrier()
5573c3b18e