Bug#818586: disk-detect/control: Improve harddrive detection dependency on s390x
Package: hw-detect
Version: 1.116
Severity: important
Tags: d-i
On Linux on z Systems, there are two major disk storage environments,
the direct-attached storage disk (DASD) and SCSI over Fibre-Channel.
There are the s390-dasd and s390-zfcp d-i modules to configure and
enable DASDs and FCP devices. Note that on s390x, disks are not
available by default to Linux and must be enabled in advance.
The s390-dasd and s390-zfcp both provide the harddrive-detection
dependency and, thus, each could fulfill the dependency to silenty
ignore the other. That behavior does not allow to mix DASDs and
SCSI disk on single installation (except you call both manually,
for example, in the expert mode).
To improve and provide a "guided" flow, I have split the harddrive
detection dependency for s390-dasd and s390-zfcp as follows:
- s390-dasd provides harddrive-detection-dasd
- s390-zfcp provides harddrive-detection-zfcp
disk-detect depends on
-> harddrive-detection-dasd
-> harddrive-detection-zfcp
and continues to provide the harddrive-detection.
With this split, the guided installation will install disk-detect to
solve the harddrive-detection dependency. In turn, disk-detect will
then rely on the s390-dasd and s390-zfcp d-i modules to provide DASD
and FC-attached SCSI disks. If both modules fail, the user perceives
the default disk-detect behavior, for example, users might configure
iSCSI.
The other nice benefit of this dependency split is the seamlessly
enablement of multipath with disk-detect (through preseeding).
For s390, multipathing should be always considered when SCSI is used.
I probably will extend the s390-zfcp module to set disk-detect's
multipath debconf variable for usability.
I will attach a patch with changelog when I have received the bug
number for report. For s390-dasd and s390-zfcp, I will also open
bug reports to implement the dependency chain.
Feedback is welcome.
Thanks and kind regards,
Hendrik
--
Hendrik Brueckner
brueckner@linux.vnet.ibm.com | IBM Deutschland Research & Development GmbH
Linux on z Systems Development | Schoenaicher Str. 220, 71032 Boeblingen
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