Re: deterministic scsi order with async scan

From: david
Date: Thu Jul 16 2009 - 13:23:52 EST


On Thu, 16 Jul 2009, Matthew Wilcox wrote:

On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 06:09:22PM -0700, david@xxxxxxx wrote:
is there any way to get deterministic device ordering with scsi async
scanning?

currently (2.6.30) it seems that the various scsi busses are loaded in
the order that they are detected, which can vary from boot to boot
depending on how long it takes for the card to initialize.

I think you're confused. The async scsi scanning was designed to _not_
move devices around randomly. There are other asynchronous schemes in
the kernel, some of which were not designed with the same care.

The SCSI async scan can't do much about it if the busses are detected
in a different order.

would it be possible to detect the cards/drives, but not register them
until all the detection is complete so that they can be registered in a
deterministic order?

That's exactly how the scsi async scanning works.

hmm, in that case how can I troubleshoot why this system is detecting the two different PCI-E cards in different orders on different boots.

David Lang

having two drives on two different controllers swap positions from boot
to boot makes it very painful. yes I can make an initrd that fixes this
up in user space by examining each drive and creating links to re-order
them, but this is a lot of work to fix randomization that can be
prevented in the first place.

David Lang
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