Am 01.10.2015 um 04:59 schrieb Grzegorz Powiedziuk:
> I think I might have found a small bug in latest update for SLES12  so this 
> is just a FYI for everyone who made the same mistake I did. 
> 
> If you use edevices, you know that the FBA driver  in linux automagically 
> (like Mark explained it to me few years ago ;) ) creates a device “1”  
> (dasda1 for example) on edevice. 
> You end up with for example dasda + dasda1  and you use dasda1 for OS 
> (including LVM) . No fdisks, no fdasds. 
> 
> I haven’t used edevices in a while so I forgot about that and my recent 
> SLES12 install I did on “dasda” (fba) , instead of  “dasda1”. I don’t know 
> how I did that but I did it and SLES install wizard didn’t complain. System 
> installed fine and it is was working ok.
> 
> pvscan on a build like this returned:
>  Volume Groups with the clustered attribute will be inaccessible.
>   PV /dev/dasda   VG root   lvm2 [19.53 GiB / 0    free]
> 
> while in proper installation it looks like this:
> 
> PV /dev/dasda1   VG lnx15   lvm2 [19.53 GiB / 0    free]
>   Total: 1 [19.53 GiB] / in use: 1 [19.53 GiB] / in no VG: 0 [0   ]
> 
> 
> Everything was working fine, until I did an update. Something has changed in 
> the way LVM recognizes physical  devices and it totally brakes the whole 
> system. It breaks all the parts where LVM is being called which includes the 
> little initrd which is loaded by  zipl during the first stage of boot. 
> 
> I did some debugging and I found that with latest update of SLES (I don’t 
> know why because the LVM seems to be in the same version) lvm doesn’t like 
> having metadata on “dasda” (fba) anymore. It likes it  only if its on dasda1 
> When pvscan scans the disk it ends up with:
>   /dev/dasda: Skipping: Partition table signature found 
> so it does not find the label and it fails to bring online the pv and volume 
> group. 
> 
> This edevice, if linked to an original SLES12 or any RHEL is working fine. 
> LVM finds a label on /dev/dasdb (fba) and I can mount it without a problem. 
> 
> I didn’t find anything different in lvm.conf which could cause this. 
> 
> To fix this (well it’s rather a dirty hack), I’ve downloaded a sourcecode of 
> LVM, found the instruction where it exits on message "Skipping: Partition 
> table signature found” , commented out that section, compiled, installed this 
> lvm, rebuilt initrds (both of them) and it worked. I got my system running 
> again. 
> 
> So the lesson is to make sure that SLES is being installed on dasda1 (fba) 
> not dasda   (only if you have edevices - with standard ECKDs  it’s probably 
> ok to do that) 
> 
> If you already have it on dasda  (FBA) - don’t update it without 
> preparations. 
> 
> Perhaps SLES shouldn’t allow to install a system this way at all?

Just guessing. Maybe this is a safety net to prevent the user from creating a
physical volume on an ECKD dasd without partition. For this case not going
onto a partion is indeed wrong. But doing so on an EDEV is certainly fine,
so maybe its just the check that is too unspecific.

Christian 

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