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Bug 171318

Summary:	dm-multipath doesn't respond to HDIO_GETGEO so oracleasm can't determine if a device is a partition or not
Product:	Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4	Reporter:	Stoo Davies <sdavies>
Component:	device-mapper	Assignee:	Alasdair Kergon <agk>
Status:	CLOSED DUPLICATE	QA Contact:
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	4.0	CC:	agk, christophe.varoqui, dmo, egoggin, lmb, tranlan
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	ia64
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2005-10-20 19:29:48 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 Stoo Davies 2005-10-20 19:05:53 UTC

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Description of problem:
When trying to run "oracleasm createdisk" against a partition that exists on a multipathed disk (dm-multipath), it complains with the message...

Device "/dev/mapper/xxxxx1" is not a partition.

The device in question is indeed a partition.

After looking through the Oracle mailing lists I found a similar bug had been
seen on another platform, it seems that oracleasm uses HDIO_GETGEO to decide if
the device is a partition or not, and dm-multipath doesn't support this.
I confirmed this by running strace against asmtool while running it.

The thread for the other platform is on the Oracle lists at...

http://oss.oracle.com/pipermail/oracleasm-users/2005-June/thread.html

the key post is...

http://oss.oracle.com/pipermail/oracleasm-users/2005-June/000036.html

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


How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Setup a multipathed disk with a single partition on it
2. Create the partition device nodes by running "kpartx -a"
3. Run "asmtool -l /dev/oracleasm -C -n VOLNAME -s /dev/multipath/xxxx"


Additional info:

Comment 1 Alasdair Kergon 2005-10-20 19:29:48 UTC

Device-mapper in general doesn't support this ioctl because it lets you set up
arbitrary mappings of devices and so there's no way it can provide any
meaningful geometry.

Multipath is a special case because there's only one real device involved so it
would be feasible to pass the ioctl through to the underlying device. [Duplicate
of 168801.]

Is the program actually *using* the result of the ioctl or does it need fixing
to check the availability of the device (or whatever it wants to know) properly?


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 168801 ***

Comment 2 Stoo Davies 2005-10-20 20:10:58 UTC

I believe oracleasm is only using this ioctl to find out if the device in
question is a partition, since it will refuse to create it's volumes on a whole
disk.

In this case I modified the oracleasm wrapper script to pass the force option to
asmtool, since the comments on the Oracle mailing list said that they only use
that ioctl during volume creation stage, and not afterwards.

This however means that if someone does pass oracleasm a whole disk it will
still use it, which Oracle wanted to avoid.