From 307ace248204b420b3519d46f6f73aa6e433e1ba Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Christian Schwarz <christian@neon.tech>
Date: Mon, 26 Aug 2024 16:44:34 +0200
Subject: [PATCH] pageserver: ensure local disk state is durable during startup

refs https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/6989

Problem
-------

After unclean shutdown, we get restarted and read the local filesystem
to make decisions on those reads. Some of the data might have not yet
been fsynced when the unclean shutdown completed.

Durability matters even though Pageservers are conceptually just a cache
of state in S3. For example:
- the cloud control plane is no control loop => pageserver responses
  to tenant attachmentm, etc, needs to be durable.
  - the storage controller does not rely on this (as much?)
- we don't have layer file checksumming, so, downloaded+renamed but not
  fsynced layer files are technically not to be trusted
  - https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/2683

Solution
--------

`syncfs` the tenants directory during startup, before we start reading from it.

This is a bit overkill because we do remove some temp files (InMemoryLayer!)
later during startup. Further, these temp files are particularly likely to
be dirty in the kernel page cache. However, we don't want to refactor that
cleanup code right now, and the dirty data on pageservers is generally
not that high. Last, with [direct
IO](https://github.com/neondatabase/neon/issues/8130) we're going to
have near-zero kernel page cache anyway quite soon.
---
 Cargo.toml                       |  2 +-
 pageserver/src/bin/pageserver.rs | 52 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++--
 2 files changed, 50 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)

diff --git a/Cargo.toml b/Cargo.toml
index 963841e34097..e038c0b4ffc3 100644
--- a/Cargo.toml
+++ b/Cargo.toml
@@ -113,7 +113,7 @@ md5 = "0.7.0"
 measured = { version = "0.0.22", features=["lasso"] }
 measured-process = { version = "0.0.22" }
 memoffset = "0.8"
-nix = { version = "0.27", features = ["fs", "process", "socket", "signal", "poll"] }
+nix = { version = "0.27", features = ["dir", "fs", "process", "socket", "signal", "poll"] }
 notify = "6.0.0"
 num_cpus = "1.15"
 num-traits = "0.2.15"
diff --git a/pageserver/src/bin/pageserver.rs b/pageserver/src/bin/pageserver.rs
index da0c11d9bf0a..7d404e50a543 100644
--- a/pageserver/src/bin/pageserver.rs
+++ b/pageserver/src/bin/pageserver.rs
@@ -126,10 +126,56 @@ fn main() -> anyhow::Result<()> {
     info!(?conf.virtual_file_direct_io, "starting with virtual_file Direct IO settings");
     info!(?conf.compact_level0_phase1_value_access, "starting with setting for compact_level0_phase1_value_access");
 
+    // The tenants directory contains all the pageserver local disk state.
+    // Create if not exists and make sure all the contents are durable before proceeding.
+    // Ensuring durability eliminates a whole bug class where we come up after an unclean shutdown.
+    // After unclea shutdown, we don't know if all the filesystem content we can read via syscalls is actually durable or not.
+    // Examples for that: OOM kill, systemd killing us during shutdown, self abort due to unrecoverable IO error.
     let tenants_path = conf.tenants_path();
-    if !tenants_path.exists() {
-        utils::crashsafe::create_dir_all(conf.tenants_path())
-            .with_context(|| format!("Failed to create tenants root dir at '{tenants_path}'"))?;
+    {
+        let open = || {
+            nix::dir::Dir::open(
+                tenants_path.as_std_path(),
+                nix::fcntl::OFlag::O_DIRECTORY | nix::fcntl::OFlag::O_RDONLY,
+                nix::sys::stat::Mode::empty(),
+            )
+        };
+        let dirfd = match open() {
+            Ok(dirfd) => dirfd,
+            Err(e) => match e {
+                nix::errno::Errno::ENOENT => {
+                    utils::crashsafe::create_dir_all(&tenants_path).with_context(|| {
+                        format!("Failed to create tenants root dir at '{tenants_path}'")
+                    })?;
+                    open().context("open tenants dir after creating it")?
+                }
+                e => anyhow::bail!(e),
+            },
+        };
+
+        let started = Instant::now();
+        // Linux guarantees durability for syncfs.
+        // POSIX doesn't have syncfs, and further does not actually guarantee durability of sync().
+        #[cfg(target_os = "linux")]
+        {
+            use std::os::fd::AsRawFd;
+            nix::unistd::syncfs(dirfd.as_raw_fd()).context("syncfs")?;
+        }
+        #[cfg(target_os = "macos")]
+        {
+            // macOS is not a production platform for Neon, don't even bother.
+            drop(dirfd);
+        }
+        #[cfg(not(any(target_os = "linux", target_os = "macos")))]
+        {
+            compile_error!("Unsupported OS");
+        }
+
+        let elapsed = started.elapsed();
+        info!(
+            elapsed_ms = elapsed.as_millis(),
+            "made tenant directory contents durable"
+        );
     }
 
     // Initialize up failpoints support