Bug 103609

Summary:	mkinitrd's (undocumented) --with-usb flag doesn't work anyway
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux Beta	Reporter:	Alexandre Oliva <aoliva>
Component:	mkinitrd	Assignee:	Jeremy Katz <katzj>
Status:	CLOSED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	David Lawrence <dkl>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	beta1
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2003-09-03 18:58:46 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Alexandre Oliva 2003-09-02 22:53:34 UTC

From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030703

Description of problem:
I was hoping I was going to be able to do some RAID1 of boot partitions and LVM
physical volumes with this external hard disk I just purchased, but it turns out
that the kernel brings up raid devices before the usb-storage module is loaded.
 In fact, mkinitrd doesn't even add usb-storage.o to the initrd filesystem, even
though /boot is mounted from a RAID1 device that does have a member in the
external disk (does it matter?), and the root filesystem is in a volume group
whose physical volumes are all raid1 devices that have replicas in the external
disk.

Worse yet: if I force usb-storage to be copied to the initrd filesystem, then
the external hard disk is not recognized at all (e.g., fdisk /dev/sda fails).

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):


How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.create raid1 device for /boot or /,  with an external usb device as one of the
replicas
2.reboot


Actual Results:  The slot that used to be taken by the usb raid1 member is
missing (i.e., the partition was not found when the raid1 device was brought up)

Expected Results:  /me would like it to be :-)

Additional info:

Comment 1 Jeremy Katz 2003-09-02 23:02:54 UTC

You have to pass --with-usb to get mkinitrd to pull in usb modules.  Otherwise,
things got horribly bad very fast (it caused a number of bugs in 8.0 which is
why it was changed back for 9 and later)

Comment 2 Alexandre Oliva 2003-09-02 23:35:29 UTC

Err...  --with-usb?  mkinitrd doesn't seem to support such an option.  I tried
--with=usb as well, but then it couldn't find a module named usb.o.  And then,
as I wrote before, --with=usb-storage had ill effects.  Can you please check the
spelling of the option you're telling me to use?  Thanks,

Comment 3 Alexandre Oliva 2003-09-02 23:54:56 UTC

Ok, so...  There is a bug in /sbin/mkinitrd in that it matches --with* before
--with-usb, but you already have a fix for that.  The other problem is that,
although I don't have root or boot in a USB device, I do have them used by the
root and boot devices, as a raid 1 member of the former, and as a raid1 member
of one of the physical volumes that form the volume group that contains the root
logical volume.  But the code to tell whether --with-usb implies $needusb
doesn't check for raid members or volume groups :-(

Comment 4 Alexandre Oliva 2003-09-03 00:01:14 UTC

Err...  Actually, I didn't either /boot or / in RAID at all (I had the wrong
pair of /boot and / in mind.  This doesn't make any difference, though, AFAICT.
 Having it in a raid device or in a physical volume, it won't be detected.

Comment 5 Alexandre Oliva 2003-09-03 16:54:20 UTC

The solution I ended up using was to explicitly add the following modules to the
mkinitrd line, in this order:

--with=usb-uhci --with=sd_mod --with=usb-storage

with Red Hat Linux 9's mkinitrd, some additional options were needed in between
(it seems to not automatically add dependencies):

--with=usbcore --with=usb-uhci --with=scsi_mod --with=sd_mod --with=usb-storage

Now it works but, heck!, USB 1.1 is slow! (as expected :-)  I just got a
firewire cable that will plug into my laptop, so let's see how that works... 
First try wasn't successful :-(

Comment 6 Alexandre Oliva 2003-09-03 17:19:27 UTC

Oh, I forgot to mention: the Shrike mkinitrd doens't add the `sleep 5' after
loading usb-storage, so it doesn't quite work out of the box either.

On the good side, Shrike can access the disk as firewire, but Severn (with a
slightly newer kernel than what shipped in the beta) can't :-(

Comment 7 Jeremy Katz 2003-09-03 18:58:46 UTC

Committed the fix for --withusb.

Not going to fix raid on usb case, although if you want to patch things to
support it, feel free to send my way.