Re: [Xen-users] Cannot start domains after FC6->F7 upgrade

[Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel@xxxxxxxxx>]

Gerry Reno wrote:
> Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> > Is your time worth switching to a more robustly supported ATA card, 
> > like a 3Ware or Adaptec? I know the Highpoint's are very inexpensive, 
> > but their "Linux support" really hasn't been reliable enough to use 
> > them for boot drives.
> That's not true.  We have been using the highpoint controllers for at 
> least five years onboard on various M/B's as well as pci cards and 
> they have been very stable.  At least until Fedora's latest kernel 
> changes starting with the 2.6.20 series.  I've had dozens of kernels 
> running over the years on these affected servers without any problems 
> until lately.
Have you been through this sort of "install drivers by hand" with each 
OS release? That can get very expensive in manpower and downtime and 
frustration, very fast.
> > I sympathize, I really do: I've had similar issues happen with a 
> > thousand servers where the "kernel team" had so customized their 
> > kernel that we couldn't reliably update to a new OS and new kernel, 
> > and I had to babysit it into operating with new hardware. (Hint: any 
> > kernel developer who can't give you a diff between the distributed 
> > kernel they started with and their new kernel, and says "we can 
> > backport anything we need from the new kernels!", should be fired 
> > immediately.)
> For us, Fedora has created the 'perfect storm'.  We read release notes 
> but didn't see any mention of lack of support for highpoint so we 
> prepared all our filesystems with LABELS and then did the upgrade.  
> Once we couldn't boot the F7 kernels and had to drop back to F6 kernel 
> then we run into the problem of the ABI incompatible changes between 
> Xen 3.0.x and 3.1.x.  Both of these problems at the same time just 
> killed us.  As far as libata I think the kernel team should have left 
> the old IDE drivers in the kernel along with libata and provided a 
> command line switch that would let the user switch back to the old 
> drivers if they had any major problems with the new drivers.  That 
> would have provided many of the non-working libata cases a temporary 
> workaround until the kernel team could solve these issues.
Well, that gets into fascinating kernel support issues. I admit I've not 
poked around the FC7 kernels, but supporting multiple drivers for the 
same hardware is awkward and tough to test: I can completely understand 
eventually dropping old drivers. Are the old drivers in the latest 
kernel source? You could build a tweaked SRPM and RPM with the old 
drivers activated instead.
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