mdraid and hpa upgrade issues (was: Fedora Rel-Eng Meeting Recap)

[Tony Nelson]

At 2:49 PM -0500 5/24/07, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
>On Thu, May 24, 2007 at 15:36:16 -0400,
>  Tony Nelson <tonynelson at georgeanelson.com> wrote:
>> At 2:55 PM -0400 5/24/07, Jarod Wilson wrote:
>> >Jarod Wilson wrote:
>> >> Okay, fc6 mdraid to f7 upgrading via anaconda works for me now.
>> >>
>> >>> Once that's done, I'll see what I can do to see if the kernel option
>> >>> libata.ignore_hpa can be used to help those who don't really wanna
>> >>> nuke their entire system to move from FC6 to F7.
>> >>
>> >> Starting in on this right now...
>> >
>> >Got the problem reproducing, but...
>> >
>> >   Unknown boot option 'libata.ignore_hpa=1': ignoring
>> >
>> >Talked to davej, module parameters can't be passed on the command line
>> >just yet. So anyone with an FC6 system that uses part of the host
>> >protected area is currently not able to upgrade to F7 using anaconda
>> >(FC6 to F7 can be done with some modprobe.conf magic and upgrading via
>> >yum though).
>> >
>> >davej is going to poke some folks who were working on a patch to allow
>> >module parameters to be passed on the kernel command line.
>>
>> Well, this keeps me from upgrading to F7!
>
>If you are using the HPA area, couldn't you update the disk so that the
>area isn't there any more? The wikipedia entry for HPA suggests that there
>is a command for getting the real size and another for updating the boundry.
>So it sounds like you should be able to update this on F6 before doing the
>upgrade.

It seems doable but would need at least two backups, as the first one will
almost certainly be put to use as the real data.  And all for a measily 34
MB that is automatically discovered by the current kernels.

If a tested tool makes it into extras I'll do it with one backup!
-- 
____________________________________________________________________
TonyN.:'                       <mailto:tonynelson at georgeanelson.com>
      '                              <http://www.georgeanelson.com/>