[Evms-devel] problems starting RAID / EVMS on boot under gentoo

[Alan <al...@uf...>]

Hey all, I set up an EVMS volume over top of two software raid5 arrays
and mounted it as a storage mount in my gentoo box, and it works great.

... until I rebooted.  

On reboot I got a message saying that the EVMS volume couldn't be
started because one of the RAID arrays was running in degraded mode.
That's fine, so I go and check /proc/mdstat and one of the arrays is
indeed running in degraded mode.  Running 

mdadm --assemble /dev/md0 /dev/hdb1 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1

told me that /dev/hdb1 was busy.  

Rebooting on a gentoo livecd gave me working raid fine and other than
needing me to run 'evms_activate' after it booted up, I had full access.

I fought with this for about 4 hours last night found this:

 - booting normally seemed to somehow lock one raid partition.  The
   kernel would detect that hdb1 had a type FD on it, try to start it
   with 1 out of 3 disks, fail, then later on after the SATA drivers are
   loaded it finds disks sda1 and sdb1 and starts the array with 2 of 3
   disks, ignoring hdb1
 - no change between having raid drivers and sata drivers in kernel or
   as modules
 - after rebooting and getting the degraded RAID array and the
   non-starting EVMS volume, I can get it running by doing the
   following:
        - start evmsn
        - deactivate /dev/md0 and /dev/md1
        - save and quit
        - (confirmed that both arrays are stopped in /proc/mdstat)
        - start evmsn
        - ensure that /dev/md0 and /dev/md1 have started again
        - save and quit
        - (confirm that both raid arrays are running in /proc/mdstat)
        - mount now available volume

I'm not sure if this is a RAID issue, an EVMS issue, a gentoo init
script issue, or what.  If anyone has similar issues I'd really
appreciate it.

System Details:
Kernel 2.6.15-gentoo-r1
raid5/dm/sata_promise either compiled in or as modules
/dev/md1 (working) - 3 ide disks
/dev/md0 (broken ) - 1 ide disk and 2 SATA disks


-- 
Alan <al...@uf...> - http://arcterex.net
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"Backups are for people who don't pray."                 -- big Mike