RHAS4u4 + PSP 7.80 = kernel panic

[Jose Molina]

Hi there,

Having opened a case with HP and never gotten not a single email response (FWIW, case 1215697356), I'm hoping anyone of you could offer some light with this problem:

We have Two new, off the shelves, DL380 G5 WITH one HBA card each one. We installed a clean RHAS4 u4, and then proceeded to install PSP 7.80.

After installing PSP 7.80 we observed that the machine hangs with Kernel Panic in the shutdown sequence (and only in the shutdown sequence)

Trying to locate the problem we saw that one of the packages in PSP actually changes the standard Kernel for this one: HP-2.6.9-42.ELsmp

The modification in grub goes preceeded with a coment that says this:
# Modified by Proliant HBA installer

We switched off to the original kernel and the problem went away! So my questions are:

1.- Is there any problem in keeping the original kernel? we plan to install an Oracle RAC, and we need to be sure that the HBAs work ok, and don't know what effect not using the patched kernel might have...

2.- Is there any patch that i might overlooked?

I think that the kernel may only have the HBA module precompiled inside the kernel, to be able to boot from it. If true, i could just stick to the original kernel and the PSP module for the HBA...

Any help would be greatly appreciated, and thanks in advance...

Attached are, kernel panic log (using serial debug), and sysreport...

[Robert Walker_8]

Gday Jose,

We have a proliant running RHEL4AS with EMC Clariion and Emulex HBAs - just use the Native Multipath IO and the standard Redhat Linux Kernel (Booting off a SAN is I believe still not supported and not a good idea with SWAP etc). The only problem with Multipath IO it is Round Robin rather than proprietary ones which may do active/ balanced etc. Still using Redhat's allowed us to keep the kernel in synch with Redhats rollouts - where as the EMC one we were restricted to at least 6month delays between any updates - this will likely be the case with HP as well.

I have tried PSP - and dont like how it puts too much stuff on the system (We only want the Smart Array manager etc). There should be options to stop it installing components (ie Network Drivers and the like).

I would imagine that ORACLE will want a predefined environment which is generally vanilla Redhat and may be the occasional ORACLE download (bin-utils was an example of 64bit systems) - I would keep the system as close to Redhat as possible if you have their support - otherwise finger pointing could become an issue.

Robert.

[Jose Molina]

Thanks a lot for the reply, i might just do that. Anyway yesterday I finally got a response, asking for more data. I'll keep the thread open a bit more, just in case.

[skt_skt]

.- Is there any problem in keeping the original kernel? we plan to install an Oracle RAC, and we need to be sure that the HBAs work ok, and don't know what effect not using the patched kernel might have...

what is the HBA tye you have. for HBA like emulex(lpfc) , the driver need to be pushed when ever we switch to a diff kernel.

2.- Is there any patch that i might overlooked?

you may run up2date --dry-run to identify the upgrades available.

I think that the kernel may only have the HBA module precompiled inside the kernel, to be able to boot from it. If true, i could just stick to the original kernel and the PSP module for the HBA...

All kernels do not have the inbulit HBA driver support.

[Stuart Browne]

Robert, just a side note.. There are separate packages for the array management stuff outside of the PSP. I've only installed 'hpasm' and 'hpacucli' packages on my machines.

[Jose Molina]

Thanks for the help.