[Gluster-devel] Bug Reports

[Gordan Bobic]

Hi guys,

My use-case is somewhat unusual, so I thought I'd report these since 
they may not get tripped under "normal" use. This is against 2.0.0rc1.

Setup is a shared root on GlusterFS/AFR with only one node (2nd node not 
yet built).

Something weird seems to happen with some uses of ncurses libraries and 
headers. If I try to compile the kernel using "make menuconfig" while 
the root FS (including ncurses libraries and headers) is on GlusterFS, 
it fails complaining that it couldn't find the headers. The exact same 
system image (same tar ball) expanded onto an ext3 file system doesn't 
exhibit this problem. In both cases /usr/src/linux is on an NFS file 
system, so since that is the same in both test cases, the problem seems 
to be connected to the root FS. Unfortunately, I cannot seem to get the 
logs out of the root FS mount since they are initially created on the 
initrd which gets deallocated after booting. :(

A similar, but wider-ranging problem happens when installing nVidia 
drivers from the nVidia supplied shell archives. It, too, fails to find 
curses and falls back to text mode. But it also then fails to install 
properly. It first complains about being unable to back up the files it 
is replacing, then it complains that it couldn't install some of the 
files. The files it places on the FS end up being badly corrupted and 
are not even identified as elf libraries (including the kernel module it 
builds). This works fine on the ext3 FS, and putting the said files into 
the tar ball and extracting them onto the Gluster root that way, creates 
the files correctly.

I know this is difficult to troubleshoot without logs, but it's 
difficult to get those when the glusterfs daemon gets started before the 
root FS gets properly mounted. Any update on when syslog logging might 
be available? That would make this much easier as those could be 
redirected to a remote syslog.

Another thing that I have found is that just after mounting the gluster 
fs that holds the real root fs (the one that gets chroot-ed to just 
before the real init gets called), the fs is initially inaccessible for 
a little while. If the root setup script mounts glusterfs, chroots to it 
and runs init the whole process fails because it cannot find a vital 
directory it checks for in the gluster root fs it just mounted. In this 
particular case (just in case it's relevant), it's /cluster directory in 
the glusterfs root, and the script tries to execute a bind-mount from 
/cluster/cdsl/2 to /cdsl.local. This fails.

However, if I add something like
ls -la /path/to/flusterfs-root/mountpoint/cluster > /dev/null
just after mointing the gluster fs, it succeeds and proceeds to mount, 
chroot and init correctly.

This seems to be related or similar to a bug somebody reported before 
where the gluster fs is inaccessible on the first access attempt after 
mounting.

Gordan