mirror of
https://github.com/neondatabase/neon.git
synced 2025-12-28 00:23:00 +00:00
7eb85c56ac
# Problem
Before this PR, `test_pageserver_catchup_while_compute_down` would
occasionally fail due to scary-looking WARN log line
```
WARN ephemeral_file_buffered_writer{...}:flush_attempt{attempt=1}: \
error flushing buffered writer buffer to disk, retrying after backoff err=Operation canceled (os error 125)
```
After lengthy investigation, the conclusion is that this is likely due
to a kernel bug related due to io_uring async workers (io-wq) and
signals.
The main indicator is that the error only ever happens in correlation
with pageserver shtudown when SIGTERM is received.
There is a fix that is merged in 6.14
kernels (`io-wq: backoff when retrying worker creation`).
However, even when I revert that patch, the issue is not reproducible
on 6.14, so, it remains a speculation.
It was ruled out that the ECANCELED is due to the executor thread
exiting before the async worker starts processing the operation.
# Solution
The workaround in this issue is to retry the operation on ECANCELED
once.
Retries are safe because the low-level io_engine operations are
idempotent.
(We don't use O_APPEND and I can't think of another flag that would make
the APIs covered by this patch not idempotent.)
# Testing
With this PR, the warn! log no longer happens on [my reproducer
setup](https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/11446#issuecomment-2843015111).
And the new rate-limited `info!`-level log line informing about the
internal retry shows up instead, as expected.
# Refs
- fixes https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/11446