On 1/28/13 5:28 PM, Tom wrote:
>
> Dear XFS folks,
>
> I have been using XFS for many years, starting on IRIX and then on RedHat
> 7.2, and now on CentOS/RHEL and Ubuntu. Last time I posted to this
> mailing list was 12 years ago. :-) I've been a happy customer!
>
> I understand that RedHat does not formally support XFS as a root filesystem
> on RHEL.
That's correct. However, I have run xfs root on Centos5, and am
currently running xfs root on RHEL6. On md raid1 in both instances. ;)
> However, up until now, I've been using it very successfully for
> years on both CentOS and Ubuntu. On CentOS, I've successfully patched
> Anaconda since CentOS 5.6 to allow XFS root file system support directly
> from Anaconda (on both bare metal and Xen VMs). Prior to that, I had code
> in %post that would simply migrate an ext3 fs to XFS. And I always run
> md raid1 (except with Xen, since I use mirroring on the dom0). I never use
> hardware RAID since I want to keep my provisioning as generic as possible.
>
> I've deployed many servers using XFS this way and it has always been
> superior for my workloads.... and superior to ext3, and ext4.
>
> ....until CentOS 5.9 came out. Now any systems that are running the stock
> CentOS 5.9 kernel (including 5.X systems upgraded to this kernel) hang
> on reboot. If I downgrade to the 5.8 kernel, the problem is resolved.
Just to be absolutely sure, do you have any xfs-kmod or kmod-xfs installed?
If so, remove it.
> I have taken an engineering approach to testing this problem in efforts
> to help resolve it. I filed a bug with CentOS, but it's probably not
> going to go anywhere upstream since RedHat probably won't support XFS on
> the root filesystem (why I still don't understand, since I fixed the
> issues with Anaconda for myself and can Kickstart systems with XFS all
> day long).
It's for non-technical reasons.
> Therefore I hope anyone here can help. In fact, I was specifically hoping
> to catch Eric Sandeen's attention since this seems like a pretty serious
> regression. It's further aggravated by the fact that RedHat stays behind
> with kernel version and backports modern fixes. I scanned over the
> 2.6.18-348.el5 (stock 5.9 kernel) changelog, and I see a few suspicious
> things, but I'm not sure.
>
> Much more detail is available here (CentOS bug id 0006217) including steps
> to reproduce the problem. Also testing with and without md raid.
> http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=6217
so it's hanging on the way down I guess?
I see: "md: md1 switched to read-only mode"
Was that there before?
> The one thing I haven't provided is a traceback. I can provide that if it
> would be helpful.
of course it would be . . .
I don't see anything obvious between the two kernels you mention, and I
can't spend a ton of time digging into this, since most of my day is
taken up supporting the RHEL customers who pay my salary, nudge nudge. ;)
I'd look at the kernel changelogs for xfs & md, and see if anything
seems plausible. Maybe diff the sources & see what changed, etc.
-Eric
> I am not in a big hurry for help, on the contrary I just want to open up
> a dialog since perhaps others might be suffering from this. And I want to
> help resolve it if I can.
>
> Any insight is appreciated.
>
> -- Tom
>
>
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