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

[Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel@xxxxxxxxx>]

Gerry Reno wrote:
> Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> > Gerry Reno wrote:
> > > 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.
> Not sure why you are saying "install drivers by hand".  We do none of 
> this.  Support for highpoint controllers has been in the kernels for a 
> long time.  Only back around 2000, 2001 did we ever have to manually 
> load any drivers for highpoint.
Ahh. *Really*. Hmm. My last direct work with Highpoint cards was.... 2 
years ago, with PCI based PATA cards to supplement a Proliant system 
whose on-board controllers mis-handled any drivers over 128 Gig. I found 
it painful to deal with, and returned the card for an Adaptec card that 
behaved beautifully.

> > > 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.
> No I'm not a kernel builder and I really don't want to start that 
> now.  I want to use a distro-supported kernel.  So for now Xen is 
> out.  I'm looking at either qemu or vmware server to bail us out of 
> this situation.
Fair enough. If I may ask, why are you using FC7? That's leading edge if 
not bleeding edge. If you need stable servers, why not use RHEL (with 
direct RedHat support), or CentOS, or stay a version behind with your 
Fedora Core to let some other poor beggar hammer out the hard bits (such 
as those you just encountered)?
I mean, does even the FC7 kernel-smp kernel work on your hardware?

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