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

To: Gerry Reno <greno@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [Xen-users] Cannot start domains after FC6->F7 upgrade
From: Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2007 20:10:39 +0100
Cc: Mark Williamson <mark.williamson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>, "Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@xxxxxxxxxx>, xen-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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Gerry Reno wrote:
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.
Ahh. *Really*. Hmm. My last direct work with Highpoint cards was.... 2 years ago, with PCI based PATA cards to supplement a Proliant system whose on-board controllers mis-handled any drivers over 128 Gig. I found it painful to deal with, and returned the card for an Adaptec card that behaved beautifully.


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.
Fair enough. If I may ask, why are you using FC7? That's leading edge if not bleeding edge. If you need stable servers, why not use RHEL (with direct RedHat support), or CentOS, or stay a version behind with your Fedora Core to let some other poor beggar hammer out the hard bits (such as those you just encountered)?

I mean, does even the FC7 kernel-smp kernel work on your hardware?

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