Installation Hang With 3Ware Card

[kbocek]

I have a new Supermicro X10-DRI motherboard with a 3Ware 9750-8i raid card. Installation of CentOS 7 hangs at the screen below



when performing a PXE boot into a VNC installation. If I remove the 3Ware card, the setup screen proceeds normally to the "Connect via VNC at x.x.x.x:1" as expected.

But if the card is installed, I get the hang you see here.

I have a properly configured array, so that's not the issue.

Does anyone have any ideas?

[kbocek]

As a test, I enabled my CentOS 6.6 VNC PXE Install configuration and sure enough, that had no problems on the same hardware. Although there was one hiccup where the installer said it couldn't find install.img and asked for the path. I made no changes to the provided path, just selected OK and the installer proceeded just fine. I was able to connect via VNC. The installer sees the 3Ware controller and partitions just fine.

This is feeling like a bug with the 7 installer.

Perhaps my PXE configuration for 7 is wrong. This is what I am using, copied from 6:

Code: Select all

LABEL CentOS 7.1 x86_64 VNC
        MENU LABEL CentOS 7.1 x86_64 VNC
        KERNEL images/centos7.1-1503-x86_64/vmlinuz
        APPEND vnc initrd=images/centos7.1-1503-x86_64/initrd.img method=http://server2.pvt/centos7.1/x86_64 lang=English keymap=us

Does that look right to everyone? Yes, the web interface is up. (.pvt is a pseudo domain for local net access.)

[kbocek]

So frustrating. CentOS 6.6 installs just fine via VNC on this hardware. SuperMicro support suggested disabling the on-board SATA but that didn't help.

So I did a minimal install of 6.6 and decided to try the new 6 to 7 upgrade process:

http://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/CentOSUpgradeTool

Even though there are some Not Ready For Prime Time warnings. Alas, after running the various tools and booting into the upgrade tool we have the same hang:



This really feels like an installer bug to me. If anyone has any 3Ware information from Red Hat, please share. Searching didn't turn up anything for me.

[chemal]

Obviously, the C7 kernel driver for your 3ware 9750-8i doesn't work with this card, as it says: command timed out, resetting card. RH removed support for several older raid cards in RHEL7 which were supported in RHEL6. They simply disable these drivers when building their kernel, but perhaps they also build some drivers for old cards that are also needed for more recent supported hardware. Anyway, a 3ware 9750 seems rather old, pre-2010 perhaps.

[kbocek]

Obviously, the C7 kernel driver for your 3ware 9750-8i doesn't work with this card, as it says: command timed out, resetting card. RH removed support for several older raid cards in RHEL7 which were supported in RHEL6. They simply disable these drivers when building their kernel, ...

Well, no. The 3w-sas driver is built into the kernel and has *not* been removed. Look a bit further up the messages to see the hardware found message: "Found an LSI 3Ware 9750-8i". I've seen this timeout message before in CentOS 6. It just takes a moment for the driver to settle.

In addition, I've been in contact with 3Ware tech support (Called Avago). Their response was the same:

Linux kernels 2.6.33 and newer include native support for the 3ware 9750 series controllers.

[chemal]

The point was in the part you removed: they ship the 3w_sas driver, sure. But I don't know if this implies support for your card. They could ship this driver because it also drives other supported 3ware cards -- or they simply forgot to disable it. You could try to file a report on RH's bugzilla and see what they say.

[kbocek]

But I don't know if this implies support for your card.

I was in the midst of editing my response to make it clearer when you posted. The 3Ware tech support people stated it in no uncertain terms:

Linux kernels 2.6.33 and newer include native support for the 3ware 9750 series controllers.

[chemal]

Look, you can either use a plain upstream kernel, which in theory should have a working driver since 2.6.33, or you use the RH kernel. If you use the RH kernel, then RH decides what they support and what works. As the EL6 kernel works with your card and the EL7 kernel doesn't, you should turn to RH if you want this to change. CentOS rebuilds RHEL bug for bug and never fixes anything.

[toracat]

As chemal mentioned, a number of drivers were dropped from the RHEL kernel when going from el6 to el7. To check whether your device is indeed one of them, you'd want to find out the vendor:device ID pair. Boot into CentOS 6 and run 'lspci -nn' to get the info.

[kbocek]

First off, as I said, CentOS 6.6 installs just fine. I did a minimal install (twice actually) to the 3Ware array with no errors.

I am unclear why I am going around with both of you. Look at the two screen shots I posted: about the middle of the first screen shot (which is the installer) and the bottom of the second (which is the upgrade tool) you can see the 3w-sas driver being loaded and it clearly finding the card, identifying the exact model and firmware version. What more do you want? The driver is present and has not been removed. 3Ware tech support has confirmed the Linux kernel supports this particular card. These screen shots are with a standard, unmodified copy of CentOS 7 x86_64.

What I am *assuming*, but which I do not know, is that there is a bug in the RH/CentOS 7 installer and that this bug is somehow interacting with the 3w-sas driver. This is evidenced by the fact that a VNC install will continue normally when the card is physically pulled from the machine.