[Openais] Re: confchg_fn, cluster membership, etc.

Steven Dake sdake at mvista.com
Fri Sep 10 13:30:59 PDT 2004


On Fri, 2004-09-10 at 10:23, Mark Haverkamp wrote:
> Steve,
> 
> I've been looking at the configuration change function and what I get
> when it is called.
> 
> When I start the first aisexec, I see that I am the only node.  This
> makes sense.
> 
> When I start a second aisexec, It first sees itself as the only node in
> the cluster.  (Does this mean that for a short time there are two
> clusters?) Then the config function gets called again and I see that the
> first node joined.  The first node on the other hand sees that the
> second node joined (which seems to be the correct view).  I would think
> that each node should see the same view of the cluster with regard to
> who is joining and who was already a member.  Is it possible to have
> each node have the same idea of who has joined and who was already a
> member?
> 

There is a good reason there are two configuration changes.  The first
configuration (called a transistional configuration) indicates who has
left the configuration.  The second configuration (called the regular
configuration) specifies who has joined the configuration.

When a partition is detected, all messages that are part of the old
configuration are delivered.  When a gap is detected in sequence
numbers, a transistional configuration is delivered, and then the
remaining messages that can be delivered are delivered.  Then the
regular configuration is delivered.  New messages are then delivered
under the new regular configuration.

This ensures that messages are delivered under the correct
configuration.

Philosophically I dont think its possible to specify, atleast with the
current vs messaging model, who has joined because of observer
relativity (see below).  The reason is that two partitions each with 4
processors could be operating seperately, and then merge.  So who would
be joining partition, and who would be the partition that was joined?

> For a function of the event service, I'd like to know if I'm the new
> guy.  The way things are I don't think that I can know this.
> 

The "new guy" is relative to the observer.  Hence, processor A thinks
processor B is the new guy, and processor B thinks processor A is the
new guy.  So who is right?  They are both right, from their observation
points.  I'm not sure how else to think about this scenario.

The mechanism I had always believed would work would be to syncrhonize
state whenever a new processor is available.  Since because of the
relativity of the observer, it is impossible to know who is new, the
algorithms have to figure out who has the correct data using some form
of algorithm that allows all processors to agree to the data set.

It is a weakness in the SA Forum AIS that what happens on a merge and
partition are unspecified.  Some policies (that are perhaps selectable)
would be useful for the specifications.  For now, we can do whatever
works.  I'd be happy enough for now, if what we had ensured that every
processor had the same data set.

> Another thing that I found is that SaClmClusterNodeT data isn't
> available in the confchg_fn for newly joining nodes.
> 

This is true and the reason we added the clm_get_by_nodeid.  If this is
too cumbersome to be useful, we can change the confchg_fn passed to
executive handlers to take the SaClmClusterNodeT data structure.  I'm
not too attracted to this idea, because it requires adding information
about the SaClmClusterNodeT data structure to exec/main.c to formulate
the data set.

Regards
-steve
> Mark.




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