[HBASE-2238] Review all transitions -- compactions, splits, region opens, log roll/splitting -- for crash-proofyness and atomicity

• Type: Umbrella
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Critical
• Resolution: Fixed
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Michael Stack
• Created: 18/Feb/10 23:58
• Updated: 11/Jun/22 23:07
• Resolved: 16/Jul/14 23:08

Description

This issue is about reviewing state transitions in hbase to ensure we're sufficently hardened against crashes. This issue I see as an umbrella issue under which we'd look at compactions, splits, log splits, region opens – what else is there? We'd look at each in turn to see how we survive crash at any time during the transition. For example, we think compactions idempotent but we need to prove it so. Splits are for sure not, not at the moment (Witness disabled parents but daughters missing or only one of them available).

Part of this issue would be writing tests that aim to break transitions.

In light of above, here is recent off-list note from Todd Lipcon (and "another"):

I thought a bit more last night about the discussion we were having
regarding various HBase components doing operations on the HDFS data,
and ensuring that in various racy scenarios that we don't have two
region servers or masters overlapping.

I came to the conclusion that ZK data can't be used to actually have
effective locks on HDFS directories, since we can never know that we
still have a ZK lock when we do an operation. Thus the operations
themselves have to be idempotent, or recoverable in the case of
multiple nodes trying to do the same thing. Or, we have to use HDFS
itself as a locking mechanism - this is what we discussed using write
leases essentially as locks.

Since I didn't really trust myself, I ran my thoughts by "Another"
and he concurs (see
below). Figured this is food for thought for designing HBase data
management to be completely safe/correct.

...

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Another <[e-mail]>
Date: Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 10:50 AM
Subject: locks
To: Todd Lipcon <[e-mail]>


Short answer is no, you're right.
Because HDFS and ZK are partitioned (in the sense that there's no
communication between them) and there may be an unknown delay between
acquiring the lock and performing the operation on HDFS you have no
way of knowing that you still own the lock, like you say.
If the lock cannot be revoked while you have it (no timeouts) then you
can atomically check that you still have the lock and do the operation
on HDFS, because checking is a no-op. Designing a system with no lock
revocation in the face of failures is an exercise for the reader :)
The right way is for HDFS and ZK to communicate to construct an atomic
operation. ZK could give a token to the client which it also gives to
HDFS, and HDFS uses that token to do admission control. There's
probably some neat theorem about causality and the impossibility of
doing distributed locking without a sufficiently strong atomic
primitive here.

Another

Issue Links

• is related to: HBASE-2696 ZooKeeper cleanup and refactor
• relates to: HBASE-2231 Compaction events should be written to HLog