B.4. The glock debugfs Interface
The glock
debugfs interface allows the visualization of the internal state of the glocks and the holders and it also includes some summary details of the objects being locked in some cases. Each line of the file either begins G: with no indentation (which refers to the glock itself) or it begins with a different letter, indented with a single space, and refers to the structures associated with the glock immediately above it in the file (H: is a holder, I: an inode, and R: a resource group) . Here is an example of what the content of this file might look like:
G: s:SH n:5/75320 f:I t:SH d:EX/0 a:0 r:3 H: s:SH f:EH e:0 p:4466 [postmark] gfs2_inode_lookup+0x14e/0x260 [gfs2] G: s:EX n:3/258028 f:yI t:EX d:EX/0 a:3 r:4 H: s:EX f:tH e:0 p:4466 [postmark] gfs2_inplace_reserve_i+0x177/0x780 [gfs2] R: n:258028 f:05 b:22256/22256 i:16800 G: s:EX n:2/219916 f:yfI t:EX d:EX/0 a:0 r:3 I: n:75661/219916 t:8 f:0x10 d:0x00000000 s:7522/7522 G: s:SH n:5/127205 f:I t:SH d:EX/0 a:0 r:3 H: s:SH f:EH e:0 p:4466 [postmark] gfs2_inode_lookup+0x14e/0x260 [gfs2] G: s:EX n:2/50382 f:yfI t:EX d:EX/0 a:0 r:2 G: s:SH n:5/302519 f:I t:SH d:EX/0 a:0 r:3 H: s:SH f:EH e:0 p:4466 [postmark] gfs2_inode_lookup+0x14e/0x260 [gfs2] G: s:SH n:5/313874 f:I t:SH d:EX/0 a:0 r:3 H: s:SH f:EH e:0 p:4466 [postmark] gfs2_inode_lookup+0x14e/0x260 [gfs2] G: s:SH n:5/271916 f:I t:SH d:EX/0 a:0 r:3 H: s:SH f:EH e:0 p:4466 [postmark] gfs2_inode_lookup+0x14e/0x260 [gfs2] G: s:SH n:5/312732 f:I t:SH d:EX/0 a:0 r:3 H: s:SH f:EH e:0 p:4466 [postmark] gfs2_inode_lookup+0x14e/0x260 [gfs2]
The above example is a series of excerpts (from an approximately 18MB file) generated by the command
cat /sys/kernel/debug/gfs2/unity:myfs/glocks >my.lock during a run of the postmark benchmark on a single node GFS2 file system. The glocks in the figure have been selected in order to show some of the more interesting features of the glock dumps.
The glock states are either EX (exclusive), DF (deferred), SH (shared) or UN (unlocked). These states correspond directly with DLM lock modes except for UN which may represent either the DLM null lock state, or that GFS2 does not hold a DLM lock (depending on the I flag as explained above). The s: field of the glock indicates the current state of the lock and the same field in the holder indicates the requested mode. If the lock is granted, the holder will have the H bit set in its flags (f: field). Otherwise, it will have the W wait bit set.
The n: field (number) indicates the number associated with each item. For glocks, that is the type number followed by the glock number so that in the above example, the first glock is n:5/75320; which indicates an
iopen glock which relates to inode 75320. In the case of inode and iopen glocks, the glock number is always identical to the inode's disk block number.
Note
The glock numbers (n: field) in the debugfs glocks file are in hexadecimal, whereas the tracepoints output lists them in decimal. This is for historical reasons; glock numbers were always written in hex, but decimal was chosen for the tracepoints so that the numbers could easily be compared with the other tracepoint output (from
blktrace for example) and with output from stat(1).
The full listing of all the flags for both the holder and the glock are set out in Table B.4, “Glock flags” and Table B.5, “Glock holder flags”. The content of lock value blocks is not currently available through the glock
debugfs interface.
Table B.3, “Glock Types” shows the meanings of the different glock types.
| Type number | Lock type | Use |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | trans | Transaction lock |
| 2 | inode | Inode metadata and data |
| 3 | rgrp | Resource group metadata |
| 4 | meta | The superblock |
| 5 | iopen | Inode last closer detection |
| 6 | flock | flock(2) syscall |
| 8 | quota | Quota operations |
| 9 | journal | Journal mutex |
One of the more important glock flags is the l (locked) flag. This is the bit lock that is used to arbitrate access to the glock state when a state change is to be performed. It is set when the state machine is about to send a remote lock request through the DLM, and only cleared when the complete operation has been performed. Sometimes this can mean that more than one lock request will have been sent, with various invalidations occurring between times.
Table B.4, “Glock flags” shows the meanings of the different glock flags.
| Flag | Name | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| d | Pending demote | A deferred (remote) demote request |
| D | Demote | A demote request (local or remote) |
| f | Log flush | The log needs to be committed before releasing this glock |
| F | Frozen | Replies from remote nodes ignored - recovery is in progress. |
| i | Invalidate in progress | In the process of invalidating pages under this glock |
| I | Initial | Set when DLM lock is associated with this glock |
| l | Locked | The glock is in the process of changing state |
| L | LRU | Set when the glock is on the LRU list` |
| o | Object | Set when the glock is associated with an object (that is, an inode for type 2 glocks, and a resource group for type 3 glocks) |
| p | Demote in progress | The glock is in the process of responding to a demote request |
| q | Queued | Set when a holder is queued to a glock, and cleared when the glock is held, but there are no remaining holders. Used as part of the algorithm the calculates the minimum hold time for a glock. |
| r | Reply pending | Reply received from remote node is awaiting processing |
| y | Dirty | Data needs flushing to disk before releasing this glock |
When a remote callback is received from a node that wants to get a lock in a mode that conflicts with that being held on the local node, then one or other of the two flags D (demote) or d (demote pending) is set. In order to prevent starvation conditions when there is contention on a particular lock, each lock is assigned a minimum hold time. A node which has not yet had the lock for the minimum hold time is allowed to retain that lock until the time interval has expired.
If the time interval has expired, then the D (demote) flag will be set and the state required will be recorded. In that case the next time there are no granted locks on the holders queue, the lock will be demoted. If the time interval has not expired, then the d (demote pending) flag is set instead. This also schedules the state machine to clear d (demote pending) and set D (demote) when the minimum hold time has expired.
The I (initial) flag is set when the glock has been assigned a DLM lock. This happens when the glock is first used and the I flag will then remain set until the glock is finally freed (which the DLM lock is unlocked).
