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

[Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel@xxxxxxxxx>]

Gerry Reno wrote:
> Yes, the situation for us is that I upgraded our servers by d/l the 
> fedora-release* rpms, installing them and then doing a 'yum -y 
> upgrade'.  And guess what?  Worked great.  Except I was not aware that 
> the new libata drivers did not properly support our old highpoint ATA 
> controllers.  So at first boot, instant crash.  So play around with 
> this for a while and then start opening bugs on the F7 kernels.  I had 
> had some problems getting the 2.6.20 series kernels booting on the 
> highpoint controllers but that was with the old IDE drivers and some 
> parameters in the kernel had changed and changed the tolerance 
> w/regard to our bus timing.  So we were getting 'unknown bus timing' 
> error there.  I worked with Sergei and Chuck and we were able to solve 
> that issue on FC6 with a BIOS tweak on our hardware.  Actually 
> overclocking the bus did the trick.  But with F7 (which I was 
> expecting to just fix all of this), things got even worse.  The new 
> libata drivers failed badly w/regard to the highpoint controllers.  So 
> the only option was to boot F7 using the old FC6 kernels.  This 
> worked, or so I thought, until I began restoring the system to 
> operational status by bringing up all the Xen guests.  Kaboom!  No way 
> could I get any of the domains to start.  So now we are really stuck.  
> I'm assuming that Alan and Sergei are probably trying to get libata 
> fixed but Alan didn't seem too optimistic that this would happen 
> soon.  I really do not want to try a bare metal restore of the server 
> back to FC6.  So now I'm trying to figure out what other options might 
> be in the picture.  I'm thinking along the lines of maybe seeing if 
> VMWare could run the xen images.  I already tried some things using 
> qemu, but the networking is way too slow.  Like 5x to 10x slower than 
> Xen.  So maybe I need to go the other way and look at openvz and just 
> toss some processes into separate ve's and do that until things get 
> straightened out with libata.
Ouch. Dude, you've just spent at least a whole work day of your valuable 
time with this, right? 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.
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.)
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