Some time ago we stopped the clean/active metadata updates
from being written to a 'spare' device in most cases so that
it could spin down and say spun down. Device failure/removal
etc are still recorded on spares.
However commit 51d5668cb2e3fd1827a55 broke this 50% of the time,
depending on whether the event count is even or odd.
The change log entry said:
This means that the alignment between 'odd/even' and
'clean/dirty' might take a little longer to attain,
how ever the code makes no attempt to create that alignment, so it
could take arbitrarily long.
So when we find that clean/dirty is not aligned with odd/even,
force a second metadata-update immediately. There are already cases
where a second metadata-update is needed immediately (e.g. when a
device fails during the metadata update). We just piggy-back on that.
Reported-by: Joe Bryant <tenminjoe@yahoo.com>
Signed-off-by: NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de>
Cc: stable@kernel.org
1176568de7