Bug 170985

Summary:	RHEL 4 Update 2 Incompatibility with VMware ESX 2.5.2
Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4	Reporter:	Bruno Clermont <dev.mem>
Component:	kernel	Assignee:	Tom Coughlan <coughlan>
Status:	CLOSED ERRATA	QA Contact:	Brian Brock <bbrock>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	4.0	CC:	eric.eisenhart, jbaron, jdeverea, jneedle, mchristi, poelstra, rkirby, tim
Target Milestone:	---	Keywords:	Regression
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i686
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:	RHSA-2006-0132	Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2006-03-07 20:27:15 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:
Bug Depends On:
Bug Blocks:	168429, 175120

Description Bruno Clermont 2005-10-17 02:07:33 UTC

Components:
- VMware ESX build 16390 (latest version on 2005-10-16)
- running on a HP Proliant Server P3 host with single CPU w/ SCSI disk
- RHEL 4 Update 2 iso files.

When booting a guest machine with the Update 2 iso file the kernel crash while
loading one of the SCSI module.

If a guest machine is installed with Update 1 it work fine until it's up2date'd
to match "Update 2" package versions and kernel upgraded to 2.6.9-22.EL.
It crashed at next reboot and require a fall back to 2.6.9-11.EL kernel.

I found this message on nahant-beta-list that look like my problem:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/nahant-beta-list/2005-August/msg00009.html
Someone else seem to had reproduce this problem before with Update 2-beta.

Comment 2 Tom Coughlan 2005-10-17 18:26:57 UTC

I am investigating the nahant-beta-list posting to see what became of it. 

In the meantime, please post the console messages that print when the system
crashes.

Comment 3 dgrace 2005-11-14 21:08:59 UTC

I found out about this bug today the hard way. Last section of console screen
before VM poweroff:

"Uncompressing Linux... Ok, booting the kernel.
PCI: Cannot allocate resource region 4 of device 0000:00:07.1
Red Hat nash version 4.2.1.6 starting
sda: assuming drive cache: write through"

System boots fine going back to 2.6.9-11.

Comment 17 Tim Morley 2006-01-11 12:59:03 UTC

There is more detail of this problem on the vmware forums. It seems that the
latest mptscsi driver does a target reset on unused targets. The real hardware
doesn't support this, and the vmware emulation dies when this happens.

There is also a patch on the vmware forums that fixes this, it would be nice for
that to get into the distribution kernels.

See http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=306923 for more details!

Comment 18 Mike Christie 2006-01-11 18:30:33 UTC

We should have something like that already. Could you try this kernel?
http://people.redhat.com/~jbaron/rhel4/RPMS.kernel/ These are experimental kernels.

Comment 19 Tim Morley 2006-01-12 14:05:09 UTC

Thanks, I've tried the smp version of that kernel and it seems to work fine.

I take it kernels like these will end up in the next update?

Comment 20 Mike Christie 2006-01-12 17:53:02 UTC

Thanks for testing. Yeah, U3.

Comment 23 Red Hat Bugzilla 2006-03-07 20:27:15 UTC

An advisory has been issued which should help the problem
described in this bug report. This report is therefore being
closed with a resolution of ERRATA. For more information
on the solution and/or where to find the updated files,
please follow the link below. You may reopen this bug report
if the solution does not work for you.

http://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2006-0132.html