oxidecomputer / oxidecomputer/omicron

Crucible must be able to activate with 2/3 downstairs redundancy

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storage Update System
Dominant language
Rust
Stars
572
Forks
97
Avg merge
2d 12h
Merged PRs (30d)
96

Description

Currently, when a Crucible upstairs is activating downstairs, it blocks until all three downstairs have responded.

This requires perfect availability of all downstairs disks for instances to be started, which is especially problematic in the live update case. In the case where we pick any single sled to be updated, we migrate all instances off that sled, and we reboot it: for the duration of that sled being updated:

  • If any instance across the fleet has a downstairs on any of the disks on the sled-under-update are trying to start...
  • They won't see an ACK from the downstairs on the sled-under-update -- so they'll hang for the entire duration of the update

This is rough - it'll be a user-visible lack-of-availability, and will continue happening for different instances as we proceed with update across sleds in the rack.

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First steps

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Research direction

No files or tests are named. Start by locating Crucible's upstairs activation and downstairs ACK handling, then trace the response-counting path; done means activation proceeds with two of three downstairs responses and does not wait for a downstairs on a sled undergoing live update.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
rust
Domain
backend, distributed-systems
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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