Bug 671482

Summary: RHEL6 mkinitrd fails to include multipath in initramfs
Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Reporter: Joseph Kachuck <jkachuck>
Component: dracutAssignee: Harald Hoyer <harald>
Status: CLOSED DUPLICATE QA Contact: Release Test Team <release-test-team>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 6.3CC: cory.meyer, jwest
Target Milestone: rc   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: Unspecified   
OS: Unspecified   
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
Doc Text:
Story Points: ---
Clone Of: Environment:
Last Closed: 2011-02-25 08:37:00 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
Documentation: --- CRM:
Verified Versions: Category: ---
oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team: --- Target Upstream Version:

Description Joseph Kachuck 2011-01-21 16:07:07 UTC
---Problem Description---
Running mkinitrd on multipath SAN boot system builds an initramfs without the multipath drives
included, so the system will orphan the paths to the SAN boot LUN.

The workaround was to run dracut directly as follows:
dracut -f -a multipath --include /etc/multipath /etc/multipath

---uname output---
Linux iopx3650lgpl3.storage.tucson.ibm.com 2.6.32-71.el6.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed Sep 1 01:33:01 EDT 2010
x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
Machine Type = x3650 7979-MC1

---Steps to Reproduce---

On a RHEL 6 system installed with mpath option,

cp /boot/initramfs-2.6.32-71.el6.x86_64.img
/boot/initramfs-2.6.32-71.el6.x86_64.img.orig

mkinitrd /boot/initramfs-2.6.32-71.el6.x86_64.img 2.6.32-71.el6.x86_64
mount both images -o loop, then diff the trees
The hba driver is brocade, the system is multipath SAN boot.
As the in distro brocade driver is only supported by brocade for install, after install the system
must be upgraded to the brocade driver.
The issue occurs when rebuilding the intramfs from mkinitrd. The resulting intramfs lacks the
multipath driver as well as /etc/multipath.conf and /etc/multipath hence the need for the dracut
workaround.

Additoinal Info
----------------
It seems that if the system only has a single lun attached, in these cases the boot LUN, mkinitrd
works, it's only after attaching multiple luns that mkinitrd fails.
Additionally to clarify, this was initially detected on a system in which we were required to use
the out of box brocade hba drivers, so to SAN boot multipaths a mkinitrd is required, and exposed
the issue.

Comment 1 Harald Hoyer 2011-02-25 08:37:00 UTC

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 642083 ***