Bug 192066

Summary:	lvcreate -s fails often
Product:	[openSUSE] SUSE Linux 10.1	Reporter:	Peter Münster <pm>
Component:	Kernel	Assignee:	Jan Blunck <jblunck>
Status:	RESOLVED DUPLICATE	QA Contact:	E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity:	Normal
Priority:	P5 - None	CC:	suse-beta
Version:	Final
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	i686
OS:	SuSE Linux 10.1
Whiteboard:
Found By:	Customer	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---

Description Peter Münster 2006-07-13 07:19:08 UTC

With normal SuSE-kernel lvcreate -s often hangs:
killing does not help, even not "kill -9", only reboot

With official kernel-2.6.17.3 lvcreate -s often fails
with the following message:
lvcreate -L 700M -s -n snap-usr -p r /dev/system/usr
  LV system/snap-usr in use: not deactivating
  Couldn't deactivate new snapshot.

Often means: about 50% of times.
The reason is perhaps some race condition in the udev-system.

Comment 1 Hannes Reinecke 2006-07-13 08:02:10 UTC

Ah. yes. This is the official kernel.
Of course it'll fail.

We have some patches for the device-mapper which introduces 'online' and 'offline' events for device-mapper devices. Problem is that you'll need a whole bunch of device-mapper ioctls to have a useable device.
Unfortunately the device event is sent after the very first ioctl, at which time the device isn't useable at all; you wouldn't even know which _type_ the device-mapper device will have.

Of course, this issue and the patch has been greeted with silence on the device-mapper mailing list. Redhat doesn't believe in device hotplugging :-(

Please try with the standard 10.1 kernel and re-open bug if the problem persists.

Comment 2 Peter Münster 2006-07-13 08:32:32 UTC

Since with the standard 10.1 kernel lvcreate -s hangs,
which is worse than normal failure, I'll continue to use
kernel-2.6.17.3
Cheers, Peter

Comment 3 Chris L Mason 2006-07-13 14:33:21 UTC

This is already fixed in the sles kernels, so the next maintenance update for 10.1 will have the fix.  The short explanation is that dm from mainline was full of races for device add/removal.

Comment 4 Greg Kroah-Hartman 2006-07-13 18:03:23 UTC

Ok, marking as fixed.

Comment 5 Peter Münster 2006-08-21 09:42:59 UTC

Hello,
now I've installed the kernel-smp-2.6.16.21-0.13:
lvcreate does no more hang, but it fails in the same
manner as the 2.6.17.3 kernel.
Cheers, Peter

Comment 8 Jan Blunck 2007-01-05 16:51:36 UTC

There were multiple issues with snapshots in the 10.1 release. The kernel side of the hang should be fixed in the SLES10_GA_BRANCH.

The user-space problem (that you describe in comment #0) was fixed in bug 178321 which was a bug in lvm2. Please update to lvm2 version >= 2.02.13 from 10.2 or openSUSE Factory.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 178321 ***