Bug#646900: [multipath-tools] Errors when Boot On SAN (IBM DS4700)

[Laurent Bigonville]

Le Wed, 04 Jan 2012 23:02:23 +0530,
Ritesh Raj Sarraf <rrs at debian.org> a écrit :

> On 01/04/2012 10:10 PM, Laurent Bigonville wrote:
[...]
> > I guess that Frido's script (or something similar) should be added
> > in the main multipath-tools package (and not only in the -boot
> > variant).
> >
> > What do you think?
> If the hardware handler is set in the multipath.conf file, the
> corresponding driver will be loaded. Yes, there will be a timing catch
> on when the device discovery triggers (which in almost all cases will
> be way before the start-up of multipathd daemon) and when the
> multipathd daemon starts.
> So this problem applies in both the cases.
> 
> We could either decide to run multipathd from within initrd. We'll
> still need to ensure that every modification to multipath.conf does
> propagate to initrd also.

This is not already what's happening, at least for the -boot variant?

> 
> OR
> 
> Load all the handlers. Not the one that I like.
> 
> 
> The simplest I can think of is to document these things, at least in
> README.Debian.  Just ensure to load the hardware handler module for
> your storage array. Such things can go into /etc/modules.

Well that was the first thing I tried (and Frido retried it also) and
it was not enough as the load_module() function is called after the
init-top scripts:

====8<====/usr/share/initramfs-tools/init====8<===

maybe_break top

# Don't do log messages here to avoid confusing graphical boots
run_scripts /scripts/init-top

maybe_break modules
[ "$quiet" != "y" ] && log_begin_msg "Loading essential drivers"
load_modules
[ "$quiet" != "y" ] && log_end_msg

====8<================8<====================8<===

Instead of loading all kernel modules, it could maybe be interesting
to add a config file in /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/ to let the user
select which hardware handler he wants to load before udev?

Cheers

Laurent Bigonville