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Bug 1271465

Summary: 40-redhat.rules: unconditional onlining of new cpus breaks maxcpus=1 and causes problems for kdump
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Reporter: David Gibson <dgibson>
Component: systemdAssignee: systemd-maint
Status: CLOSED DUPLICATE QA Contact: qe-baseos-daemons
Severity: urgent Docs Contact:
Priority: unspecified    
Version: 7.2CC: dgibson, hannsj_uhl, lvivier, systemd-maint-list
Target Milestone: rc   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: ppc64le   
OS: Unspecified   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2015-10-14 05:44:01 UTC Type: Bug
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:
Bug Depends On:    
Bug Blocks: 1270174    

Description David Gibson 2015-10-14 05:36:03 UTC
Description of problem:

The /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/40-redhat.rules included in the normal systemd package includes a rule which brings any offline CPUs online.

SUBSYSTEM=="cpu", ACTION=="add", TEST=="online", ATTR{online}=="0", ENV{CPU_LEAVE_OFFLINE}!="yes", ATTR{online}="1"

It looks like this is intended so that newly hotplugged CPUs will be automatically activated.

However, if any CPUs are present, but offline at boot - such as when the maxcpus kernel command line option is used - then those CPUs will be brought online by udevd, which is not what a user would probably expect.

In particular, this means that kdump setups using maxcpus=1 end up with SMP enabled, which is a complexity we don't want for something supposed to be as simple and reliable as possible.


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

systemd-219-19.el7.ppc64le

How reproducible:

100%


Steps to Reproduce:
1.  Boot up system, with maxcpus=1 on the command line
2.  Once booted, check /proc/cpuinfo

Actual results:

All present CPUs are online.

Expected results:

Only one CPU is online.


Additional info:

  * For kdump on x86, this is addressed by using "nr_cpus=1" instead of "maxcpus=1", which prevents more cpus being added later.  Complexities with cpu threading modes means that nr_cpus=NN doesn't work properly on Power (bug 1222059 has some more information).

 * An alternative approach specific to kdump would be to alter construction of the kdump initramfs to exclude this rule.  However, I can't see a straightforward way of doing that without excluding 40-redhat.rules entirely, which might have other rules which are important during a kdump.

Comment 1 David Gibson 2015-10-14 05:44:01 UTC

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 1266322 ***