Re: [Xen-users] Cannot start domains after FC6->F7 upgrade

[Gerry Reno <greno@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> Gerry Reno wrote:
> > That's not true.  We have been using the highpoint controllers for at 
> > least five years onboard on various M/B's as well as pci cards and 
> > they have been very stable.  At least until Fedora's latest kernel 
> > changes starting with the 2.6.20 series.  I've had dozens of kernels 
> > running over the years on these affected servers without any problems 
> > until lately.
> Have you been through this sort of "install drivers by hand" with each 
> OS release? That can get very expensive in manpower and downtime and 
> frustration, very fast.
Not sure why you are saying "install drivers by hand".  We do none of 
this.  Support for highpoint controllers has been in the kernels for a 
long time.  Only back around 2000, 2001 did we ever have to manually 
load any drivers for highpoint.
> > For us, Fedora has created the 'perfect storm'.  We read release 
> > notes but didn't see any mention of lack of support for highpoint so 
> > we prepared all our filesystems with LABELS and then did the 
> > upgrade.  Once we couldn't boot the F7 kernels and had to drop back 
> > to F6 kernel then we run into the problem of the ABI incompatible 
> > changes between Xen 3.0.x and 3.1.x.  Both of these problems at the 
> > same time just killed us.  As far as libata I think the kernel team 
> > should have left the old IDE drivers in the kernel along with libata 
> > and provided a command line switch that would let the user switch 
> > back to the old drivers if they had any major problems with the new 
> > drivers.  That would have provided many of the non-working libata 
> > cases a temporary workaround until the kernel team could solve these 
> > issues.
> Well, that gets into fascinating kernel support issues. I admit I've 
> not poked around the FC7 kernels, but supporting multiple drivers for 
> the same hardware is awkward and tough to test: I can completely 
> understand eventually dropping old drivers. Are the old drivers in the 
> latest kernel source? You could build a tweaked SRPM and RPM with the 
> old drivers activated instead.
No I'm not a kernel builder and I really don't want to start that now.  
I want to use a distro-supported kernel.  So for now Xen is out.  I'm 
looking at either qemu or vmware server to bail us out of this situation.

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