I'm investigating an issue we're seeing on a couple ARM servers, and it
looks like this maybe the same issue here. What it looks like is that
the mpt3sas driver is being downloaded/loaded just before the
partitioner starts. Since the kernel is configured to scan for SCSI
devices asynchronously, the partitioner ends up being displayed before
disk detection has completed. When the reporter goes "Back" and re-
enters the partitioner, the disks now appear because scanning has
completed in the meantime.

The proposal in comment #3 would pre-load the mpt3sas driver into the
initrd instead of fetching it from the mirror. This would make it
available earlier in the installer which, for this case, may give
mpt3sas enough time to complete its asynchronous scan before getting to
the partitioner phase. But, I don't think it fixes the general problem.
I suspect systems with lots of disks and/or automated (preseeded)
installs would still be at risk of running into this race.

Back-in-the-day, there was a scsi_wait_scan module that you could load,
and insmod would block until all asynchronous scans were complete. That
no longer exists, and I haven't been able to find a reasonable userspace
replacement. One thing we *could* do is add scsi_mod.scan=sync to d-i
before the "---", which would force synchronous scanning during install
time, but leave asynchronous scanning enabled for the runtime.

-- 
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1779815

Title:
  [Ubuntu 18.04.01][BostonLC][mpt3sas] installer does not detect any LSI
  based SAS/md raid device

To manage notifications about this bug go to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-power-systems/+bug/1779815/+subscriptions

-- 
ubuntu-bugs mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs

Reply via email to