Bug 37935 - On RH 7.1 only the first device gets queried/configured for each SCSI/Fibre Channel adpater
Summary: On RH 7.1 only the first device gets queried/configured for each SCSI/Fibre C...
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG
Alias: None
Product: Red Hat Linux
Classification: Retired
Component: kernel
Version: 7.1
Hardware: i586
OS: Linux
high
high
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Arjan van de Ven
QA Contact: Brock Organ
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2001-04-26 22:22 UTC by IBM Bug Proxy
Modified: 2005-10-31 22:00 UTC (History)
0 users

Fixed In Version:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2001-04-26 22:23:04 UTC
Embargoed:


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Description IBM Bug Proxy 2001-04-26 22:23:00 UTC
On RedHat 7.1, the kernel is shipped with the following FLAG turned off.
# CONFIG_SCSI_MULTI_LUN is not set

As a result of this only the first SCSI device is being queried/configured
for each SCSI or Fibre Channel adapter. In GPFS environement, this is not 
suitable since we definitely have storage sub-systems attached to the
storage
nodes that have more than one device configured.

Basically I had to re-build the kernel after setting the variable
CONFIG_SCSI_MULTI_LUN=y in the kernel config file.

As it stands now, GPFS customers cannot use the stock kernel that ships
with RedHat 7.1. They will need to re-build the kernel in order for GPFS to
have access to all the disks on a node. The thing that needs to be addresed
is
that are we going to ask/expect the customers to re-build the kernel?

Comment 1 Doug Ledford 2001-04-27 15:06:16 UTC
We tried shipping a kernel with CONFIG_SCSI_MULTI_LUN=y before and it will
*NEVER* happen again.  There are simply *way* too many broken devices out there
that lock up when you scan them for possible devices on luns > 0.

There are three other ways to solve this problem besides the nightmare you are
proposing.

1)  Use the scsi-add-single-device command:

echo "scsi-add-single-device a b c d" > /proc/scsi/scsi

where a == SCSI host #, b == SCSI Channel # on SCSI host, c == Target ID #, and
d == LUN #.  If there is a device at the given address, this will add it to the
running kernel so it can be accessed.  There is also an analogous
scsi-remove-single-device command that is operated in exactly the same way.

2)  If, and only if, the system uses *only* devices that can withstand probes
for luns > 0, then you can pass the option max_scsi_luns=8 to the scsi_mod.o
module.  To do this, modify the /etc/modules.conf file by adding the line:

options scsi_mod max_scsi_luns=8

then remake all of the initrd images on the system and re-run lilo to active the
new initrd images, then reboot the system.  At that point, all of the devices on
luns 0 through 7 should have been scanned and discovered.  If you have only
fiber channel devices in the system, and not scsi devices, then it's possible to
change that number to something higher (whatever the fiber channel controllers
will support, for example, 255 on the QLogic qla2x00 driven cards).

3)  Add an entry to the SCSI blacklist in scsi_scan.c that tags your particular
attached storage hardware as being multi-lun and forces a lun scan on your
devices.  Look in the file scsi_scan.c for examples of the usage of
BLIST_FORCELUN and BLIST_SPARSELUN to see what I'm referring to.  The FORCELUN
flag is used on devices that always allocate their luns sequentially (aka, Dell
Percraid controllers) while the SPARSELUN is used on devices that don't always
allocate luns sequentially (aka, lots of EMC raid arrays).

I'm closing this out as NOTABUG.  If you want your devices added to the scsi
blacklist, then attach the information on the drive's VENDOR and MODEL strings
to this bug report (preferably, configure multiple types of array on the device,
and at least one pass-through disk device, then attach the /proc/scsi/scsi file
contents so that we can see what all of the possible device names look like).


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