vxiod - Veritas Volume Manager I/O daemon process control device

The vxiod device in Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) is used to control the number of volume I/O daemons active on the system. A process context is necessary to implement the plex consistency recovery and writeback error handling policies for multi-plex volumes, and for continuing normal I/O after a log write if the volume has logging enabled. It is also required for the plex recovery performed with a mirrored volume in the read/writeback mode.

There are three aspects of I/O daemon operations:

o	General I/O
o	Error handling
o	Log handling

I/O handling is achieved by an ioctl command that does not return, but instead calls the vxiod routine to wait for errors or I/O requests and process them. When an error occurs, if there are no I/O daemons active, the I/O simply turns into a failure on that plex. If a general I/O request is queued up when no daemons exist, then the I/O will hang forever until a daemon process is created. If I/O daemons are active, then the I/O is put on a work queue and the daemons are awakened. A daemon takes an error request and tries to read other plexes until a read succeeds or all plexes have been tried. Then, if the writeback facility is enabled, the daemon tries to write the good data to each plex that failed on the read. If the write is successful, the read error is nullified. An I/O request is handled in a similar manner.

Logging is handled in a similar manner. An ioctl command, which does not return, is issued to create a daemon for each volume which has logging enabled. This daemon monitors two queues: one queue of I/O which was started while the log was busy (the ‘‘log’’ queue), and another queue of requests which have been logged and now need to be started (the ‘‘ready’’ queue). I/O requests are taken from the log queue when the log is no longer busy, and another log write is started. Completion of a log write results in all I/O requests which have just been logged being placed on the I/O daemon’s ready queue where they are immediately started.

One mechanism finds out how many I/O error daemons are running, and another mechanism allows a process to become an I/O daemon. Before a process becomes an I/O daemon, it should close all open files and detach from the controlling tty. An I/O or logging daemon cannot be killed except through an explicit ioctl.

/dev/vx/iod	vxiod control device

vxiod(1M), ioctl(2)