Bug 116425

Summary:	Unable to open /dev/sdf
Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3	Reporter:	Brock Organ <borgan>
Component:	kernel	Assignee:	Pete Zaitcev <zaitcev>
Status:	CLOSED RAWHIDE	QA Contact:	Brian Brock <bbrock>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	3.0	CC:	petrides, riel, shillman
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	s390
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2004-03-10 17:09:04 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 Brock Organ 2004-02-20 23:06:29 UTC

* RHEL3-U1 s390
* zfcp support (scsi over fiber)

Certain /dev/sd* devices incorrectly are "Unable to open"

For example, with the following 16 drive list (ie sda-sdp), the
following disks are not available: 

sdf, sdh, sdj, sdl, sdn, sdp

# ls -l /dev/sdf /dev/sdh /dev/sdj /dev/sdl /dev/sdn /dev/sdp
brw-r--r--    1 root     root       8,  72 Feb 20 12:57 /dev/sdf
brw-r--r--    1 root     root       8,  88 Feb 20 12:57 /dev/sdh
brw-r--r--    1 root     root       8, 104 Feb 20 12:57 /dev/sdj
brw-r--r--    1 root     root       8, 120 Feb 20 12:57 /dev/sdl
brw-r--r--    1 root     root       8, 136 Feb 20 12:57 /dev/sdn
brw-r--r--    1 root     root       8, 152 Feb 20 12:57 /dev/sdp
#

so each of the unavailable disks are not usable (such as with fdisk or
mdadm or other user space tools):

# fdisk /dev/sdf

Unable to open /dev/sdf
#

The other devices are usable (sda example):

# fdisk -l /dev/sda

Disk /dev/sda: 4000 MB, 4000022528 bytes
124 heads, 62 sectors/track, 1016 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 7688 * 512 = 3936256 bytes

   Device Boot    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1             1       900   3459569   83  Linux
/dev/sda2           901      1016    445904   fd  Linux raid autodetect
#

Comment 1 Suzanne Hillman 2004-02-24 15:44:08 UTC

I'm a little confused. I'm reading this to say that there are
unavailable disks from sdf-sdp, and that fdisk-ing one of those
devices causes it to say that it's unable to open it. Why is this a
problem? What do you expect/want to be happening?

Comment 2 Brock Organ 2004-03-02 19:03:17 UTC

sorry, that is confusing, let me try to be clearer: :)

my zfcp map defines 16 scsi disks (sda-sdp) ... so I would expect all
16 disks to be fdisk-able, for example ... 10 of the 16 disks, in fact
are available (fdisk-able), but for unknown reasons, 6 of them are not
...

Comment 3 Brock Organ 2004-03-10 17:09:04 UTC

this seems to not be present in more recent test trees ... will
re-open if I can reproduce it/get more details ...