[openstack-dev] creating a default for oslo config variables within a project?

Sean Dague sean at dague.net
Tue Dec 3 23:09:22 UTC 2013


On 12/03/2013 05:50 PM, Mark McLoughlin wrote:
> On Tue, 2013-12-03 at 16:23 -0600, Ben Nemec wrote:
>> On 2013-12-03 15:56, Sean Dague wrote:
>>> This cinder patch - https://review.openstack.org/#/c/48935/
>>>
>>> Is blocked on failing upgrade because the updated oslo lockutils won't
>>> function until there is a specific configuration variable added to the
>>> cinder.conf.
>>>
>>> That work around is proposed here -
>>> https://review.openstack.org/#/c/52070/3
>>>
>>> However I think this is exactly the kind of forward breaks that we want
>>> to prevent with grenade, as cinder failing to function after a rolling
>>> upgrade because a config item wasn't added is exactly the kind of pain
>>> we are trying to prevent happening to ops.
>>>
>>> So the question is, how is this done correctly so that a default can be
>>> set in the cinder code for this value, and it not require a config
>>> change to work?
> 
> You're absolutely correct, in principle - if the default value for
> lock_path worked for users before, we should absolutely continue to
> support it.
> 
>> I don't know that I have a good answer on how to handle this, but for 
>> context this change is the result of a nasty bug in lockutils that meant 
>> external locks were doing nothing if lock_path wasn't set.  Basically 
>> it's something we should never have allowed in the first place.
>>
>> As far as setting this in code, it's important that all of the processes 
>> for a service are using the same value to avoid the same bad situation 
>> we were in before.  For tests, we have a lockutils wrapper 
>> (https://github.com/openstack/oslo-incubator/blob/master/openstack/common/lockutils.py#L282) that sets an environment variable to address this, but that only works if all of the processes are going to be spawned from within the same wrapper, and I'm not sure how secure that is for production deployments since it puts all of the lock files in a temporary directory.
> 
> Right, I don't think the previous default really "worked" - if you used
> the default, then external locking was broken.
> 
> I suspect most distros do set a default - I see RDO has this in its
> default nova.conf:
> 
>   lock_path = /var/lib/nova/tmp
> 
> So, yes - this is all terrible.
> 
> IMHO, rather than raise an exception we should log a big fat warning
> about relying on the default and perhaps just treat the lock as an
> in-process lock in that case ... since that's essentially what it was
> before, right?

So a default of lock_path = /tmp will work (FHS says that path has to be
there), even if not optimal. Could we make it a default value like that
instead of the current default which is null (and hence the problem).

	-Sean

-- 
Sean Dague
http://dague.net



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