------- Comment From [email protected] 2016-03-18 04:35 EDT-------
(In reply to comment #6)
> The upstream defconfig value for this setting is pretty much exclusively
> =y on all architectures and specifically for s390 is =y:
>
> arch/s390/defconfig:CONFIG_SCSI_SCAN_ASYNC=y

That's no longer the case for v4.5

http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=cb14def6a9cae973ba6f702443c8fc589998279c

Historically, it was turned on for defconfig by accident, the
configuration options in the arch/s390/configs/ directory has never
turned it on.

> Examining the RHEL based host system that runs our KVM instances on our
> local z-series system, those have the option set to =y as well:
>
> [root@s2lp7 ~]# grep CONFIG_SCSI_SCAN_ASYNC -r
> /boot/config-3.10.0-123.20.1.el7_0.kvmibm.1*
> /boot/config-3.10.0-123.20.1.el7_0.kvmibm.12.s390x:CONFIG_SCSI_SCAN_ASYNC=y
> /boot/config-3.10.0-123.20.1.el7_0.kvmibm.12.s390x.kdump:
> CONFIG_SCSI_SCAN_ASYNC=y
> /boot/config-3.10.0-123.20.1.el7_0.kvmibm.15.s390x:CONFIG_SCSI_SCAN_ASYNC=y
> /boot/config-3.10.0-123.20.1.el7_0.kvmibm.15.s390x.kdump:
> CONFIG_SCSI_SCAN_ASYNC=y

I will let the KVM team know and let them decide to keep this
configuration option or not.

>
> Simiarly for the current debian s390x kernels:
>
> $ grep SCSI_SCAN_ASYNC X/boot/config-4.4.0-1-s390x
> CONFIG_SCSI_SCAN_ASYNC=y
> $
>
> > Apart from testing, the reason why I suggest to change this setting goes 
> > back
> > to a talk with the zfcp device driver maintainer. I stumbled over this
> > setting as trying out FCP devices on a Debian s390 system. Tools are
> > expecting that attached LUNs to an FCP device should be synchronously, that
> > means, the requests should be synchronously processed by the FCP device and
> > the SCSI layer on top. Asynchronous processing might cause problems in tools
> > that expect synchronous behavior. Further, asynchronous handling makes it
> > more harder to wait for the SCSI device becomes available (if it exists at
> > all). Thus, tools have to actively wait for something to happen... and the
> > worst thing is, that there is no tooling at all that waits for asynchronous
> > processing to become completed (udevadm settle is useless here as there are
> > no uevent for LUN attachment requests).
>
> This is a mischaracterisation of the effect of this configuration option.
> The option does not make device discovery asynchronous with respect
> to userspace.
>
> The primary consequence of enabling this option is that the system
> does not wait for the devices to be found before moving on to other
> cpu intensive initialisation.  This improves boot time by allowing us

Yes... I know that argument. At the end, you will be in the 
wait_for_device_probe()
and sleep until the desired devices will appear or the initramfs fails due to a
timeout.  The scsi_debug kernel module no longer exist to wait until async
processing is completed.

> to go ahead and decompress the initrd in parallel with device discovery
> utilising the otherwise idle CPU.  Further, it does not change the order
> in which discovered devices are numbered or indeed reported to userspace
> via udev; at the end of discovery the events announcing devices are
> emitted in the same order they would have been in a synchronous scan.
> But most important all asynchronous discovery must complete before
> we start the first userspace process (see wait_for_device_probe() in
> prepare_namespace()) rendering it synchronous with respect to init.
>
> Given this has been the default model for all architectures for some
> years, the asynchronous path is by far the path most travelled and most
> tested.  I am resistant to making s390x the only architecture that uses
> the synchronous model.  Especially as it is likely to increase image
> boot times.

The preferred setting from our team is to turn it off. Of course, the final
decision is up to you.

I am also going to reject this BZ at our side for now.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1557692

Title:
  s390/kconfig: do not set CONFIG_SCSI_SCAN_ASYNC

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