No F21 on Intel BIOS RAID? Workaround?

[Ian Pilcher]

I just tried to install RC5 on my home system, which uses Intel BIOS
RAID, and anaconda crashed during its initial storage scan.

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1170755

Short of major surgery (pulling the RAID drives, breaking the RAID,
etc.), can anyone think of a way to get F21 installed on this system?

-- 
========================================================================
Ian Pilcher                                         arequipeno(a)gmail.com
-------- "I grew up before Mark Zuckerberg invented friendship" --------
========================================================================

[Tom Horsley]

On Thu, 04 Dec 2014 13:21:49 -0600
Ian Pilcher wrote:

>  Short of major surgery (pulling the RAID drives, breaking the RAID,
>  etc.), can anyone think of a way to get F21 installed on this system? 
Well, if it is strictly an anaconda problem, you could install
inside a virtual machine, then copy the partitions off the virtual
disk image to real partitions and fix UUIDs and wot-not in the
grub.cfg and fstab files.

[poma]

On 04.12.2014 20:21, Ian Pilcher wrote:
>  I just tried to install RC5 on my home system, which uses Intel BIOS
>  RAID, and anaconda crashed during its initial storage scan.
>  
>    https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1170755
>  
>  Short of major surgery (pulling the RAID drives, breaking the RAID,
>  etc.), can anyone think of a way to get F21 installed on this system?
>   
RAID
http://skrypuch.com/raid

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2014-12-04 at 13:21 -0600, Ian Pilcher wrote:
>  I just tried to install RC5 on my home system, which uses Intel BIOS
>  RAID, and anaconda crashed during its initial storage scan.
>  
>    https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1170755
>  
>  Short of major surgery (pulling the RAID drives, breaking the RAID,
>  etc.), can anyone think of a way to get F21 installed on this system? 
That's odd, I tested here and it worked fine. Hum. I may only have
tested install over an already-populated array at Beta, though.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2014-12-04 at 13:21 -0600, Ian Pilcher wrote:

>  Short of major surgery (pulling the RAID drives, breaking the RAID,
>  etc.), can anyone think of a way to get F21 installed on this system? 
If you were planning to wipe the entire disk for the install anyway, try
doing that from a live image with fdisk or parted before installing -
installing to an empty array may work. Otherwise, wait for the anaconda
devs to read the report, and if they find a fix, they should be able to
provide an updates.img for you that will fix it.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net

[Chris Murphy]

On Thu, Dec 4, 2014 at 12:21 PM, Ian Pilcher <arequipeno(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
>  I just tried to install RC5 on my home system, which uses Intel BIOS
>  RAID, and anaconda crashed during its initial storage scan.
>
>    https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1170755
>
>  Short of major surgery (pulling the RAID drives, breaking the RAID,
>  etc.), can anyone think of a way to get F21 installed on this system? 
When booted from any install media, in a shell, what do you get for:
cat /proc/mdstat
mdadm -D /dev/md126
mdadm -E /dev/sd[ab]

> From the program.log, I'm seeing sd[ab]5 are bcache partitions,
> and 
looks like they're outside of the imsm container, is that correct? I
don't know whether this is a supportedlayout, my expectation when
using firmware RAID is that the firmware (and later the md driver)
asserts complete control over the entire block device. Any partitions
are created within the container. If that's correct, the bcache
partitions would need to be inside the imsm container as well. But in
any case the installer shouldn't crash, it should inform. The version
of mdadm in F21 is the same for three months, so if there's a
regression here it's not recent.

-- 
Chris Murphy

[Ian Pilcher]

On 12/04/2014 03:35 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
>  On Thu, Dec 4, 2014 at 12:21 PM, Ian Pilcher
> <arequipeno(a)gmail.com&gt; wrote:
> > I just tried to install RC5 on my home system, which uses Intel BIOS
> > RAID, and anaconda crashed during its initial storage scan.
> >
> >   https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1170755
> >
> > Short of major surgery (pulling the RAID drives, breaking the RAID,
> > etc.), can anyone think of a way to get F21 installed on this system?
>  
>  When booted from any install media, in a shell, what do you get for: 
Here's what I get when booted into F20:

>  cat /proc/mdstat 
Personalities : [raid1]
md126 : active raid1 sdb[1] sdc[0]
      976759808 blocks super external:/md127/0 [2/2] [UU]

md127 : inactive sdc[1](S) sdb[0](S)
      5288 blocks super external:imsm

unused devices: <none>

>  mdadm -D /dev/md126 
/dev/md126:
      Container : /dev/md/imsm0, member 0
     Raid Level : raid1
     Array Size : 976759808 (931.51 GiB 1000.20 GB)
  Used Dev Size : 976759940 (931.51 GiB 1000.20 GB)
   Raid Devices : 2
  Total Devices : 2

          State : clean
 Active Devices : 2
Working Devices : 2
 Failed Devices : 0
  Spare Devices : 0


           UUID : 3d7bd72f:82a8cbcc:2d217397:12f3ff95
    Number   Major   Minor   RaidDevice State
       1       8       16        0      active sync   /dev/sdb
       0       8       32        1      active sync   /dev/sdc

>  mdadm -E /dev/sd[ab] 
I assume you mean "mdadm -E /dev/sd[bc]".

/dev/sdb:
          Magic : Intel Raid ISM Cfg Sig.
        Version : 1.1.00
    Orig Family : d7e8a7e3
         Family : d7e8a7e3
     Generation : 00114ca2
     Attributes : All supported
           UUID : 1ebd7712:2a74af1f:34298316:cb855b50
       Checksum : d1e422ca correct
    MPB Sectors : 1
          Disks : 2
   RAID Devices : 1

  Disk00 Serial : MSK5235H29X18G
          State : active
             Id : 00000001
    Usable Size : 1953519880 (931.51 GiB 1000.20 GB)

[Volume0]:
           UUID : 3d7bd72f:82a8cbcc:2d217397:12f3ff95
     RAID Level : 1
        Members : 2
          Slots : [UU]
    Failed disk : none
      This Slot : 0
     Array Size : 1953519616 (931.51 GiB 1000.20 GB)
   Per Dev Size : 1953519880 (931.51 GiB 1000.20 GB)
  Sector Offset : 0
    Num Stripes : 7630936
     Chunk Size : 64 KiB
       Reserved : 0
  Migrate State : idle
      Map State : normal
    Dirty State : dirty

  Disk01 Serial : MSK5235H2PJ7TG
          State : active
             Id : 00000002
    Usable Size : 1953519880 (931.51 GiB 1000.20 GB)
/dev/sdc:
          Magic : Intel Raid ISM Cfg Sig.
        Version : 1.1.00
    Orig Family : d7e8a7e3
         Family : d7e8a7e3
     Generation : 00114ca2
     Attributes : All supported
           UUID : 1ebd7712:2a74af1f:34298316:cb855b50
       Checksum : d1e422ca correct
    MPB Sectors : 1
          Disks : 2
   RAID Devices : 1

  Disk01 Serial : MSK5235H2PJ7TG
          State : active
             Id : 00000002
    Usable Size : 1953519880 (931.51 GiB 1000.20 GB)

[Volume0]:
           UUID : 3d7bd72f:82a8cbcc:2d217397:12f3ff95
     RAID Level : 1
        Members : 2
          Slots : [UU]
    Failed disk : none
      This Slot : 1
     Array Size : 1953519616 (931.51 GiB 1000.20 GB)
   Per Dev Size : 1953519880 (931.51 GiB 1000.20 GB)
  Sector Offset : 0
    Num Stripes : 7630936
     Chunk Size : 64 KiB
       Reserved : 0
  Migrate State : idle
      Map State : normal
    Dirty State : dirty

  Disk00 Serial : MSK5235H29X18G
          State : active
             Id : 00000001
    Usable Size : 1953519880 (931.51 GiB 1000.20 GB)

>  From the program.log, I'm seeing sd[ab]5 are bcache partitions,
> and
>  looks like they're outside of the imsm container, is that correct? I
>  don't know whether this is a supportedlayout, my expectation when
>  using firmware RAID is that the firmware (and later the md driver)
>  asserts complete control over the entire block device. Any partitions
>  are created within the container. If that's correct, the bcache
>  partitions would need to be inside the imsm container as well. But in
>  any case the installer shouldn't crash, it should inform. The version
>  of mdadm in F21 is the same for three months, so if there's a
>  regression here it's not recent. 
The RAID device (md126) is composed of sdb and sdc.  md126p5 is the
bcache backing device.  sda is an (un-RAIDed) SSD; sda2 is the bcache
cache device.

As I just posted to the Bugzilla ...

I did some playing around with running "anaconda --askmethod" from a
live CD, and the results were ... interesting.  At first, I got the
expected crash, so I edited /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/blivet/
devicelibs/mdraid.py and added some additional logging to both
name_from_md_node and md_node_from_name.  Just to ensure that the
updated version was used, I also deleted the mdraid.pyc and mdraid.pyo.

Once I did this, the crash went away.

This suggests a couple of different possibilities to me:

1. There was something messed up about the pre-compiled files.

2. (Far more likely) some sort of race condition with udev.  Partitions
   on top of MD RAID seem to take a particularly long time for all of
   the helper programs to run, so perhaps udev simply isn't finished
   creating all the symlinks that anaconda needs (until I slow anaconda
   down by adding the logging and/or removing the pre-compiled files).


-- 
========================================================================
Ian Pilcher                                         arequipeno(a)gmail.com
-------- "I grew up before Mark Zuckerberg invented friendship" --------
========================================================================