[sles-beta] cciss driver for HP hardware

[Scott Bahling]

Hi Tom,

On Mon, 2014-06-23 at 23:18 -0400, Tom Parker wrote:
> Thanks Matthias. 
> 
> The hpsa_allow_any=1 does not work on the G5 HP hardware. 
> 
> What I do find interesting is that openSuSE 13.1 which is running
> 3.11.10 has no problem on these systems and has both the cciss driver
> and the hpsa driver available.  It uses the cciss driver on the old
> hardware and the hpsa driver on the new.  My frustration is that I don't
> see a reason for a mainline kernel driver to be removed.

In our enterprise product we try to only carry drivers that we can
guarantee full support for - this is especially true and critical for
storage devices. With cciss and hpsa we rely on our partnership with HP
as the developer, maintainer, and true expert of the hardware and
associated drivers to provide full, mission critical level support to
our mutual end users. HP has indicated that will no longer be supporting
the cciss driver in the future and therefore it's been deprecated from
our future products.

openSUSE, on the other hand, comes without any support commitments, so
is "safe" to carry the cciss as well as many other drivers that are
considered "unsupportable" in the enterprise sense.

> If there are
> conflicts with the pciids between these two drivers then it would seem
> that a relatively simple patch should be able to remove any pciids that
> should go to the hpsa kernel module from the cciss module
> 
> I guess for my older servers I will have to stick to SLES 11 SP3.  Sadly
> this means that for my Dev and QA labs I will have to make a significant
> investment to upgrade our physical infrastructure to run SLES 12.

> Does anyone else on this list still use HP G5 servers?

You might want to contact your HP representative to find out their plans
certify and support G5's with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12. 

> Tom

Best Regards,

Scott

> On 23/06/14 11:01 PM, Matthias G. Eckermann wrote:
> > Hello Tom and all,
> >
> > as already said in my last E-Mail about this topic, we
> > are taking input on drivers also from the vendor of the
> > respective hardware.
> >
> > Regressions on this we try to mitigate, and compared to
> > other recent distributions, SLES 12 has special code in
> > the hpsa driver to support more of the older
> > controllers, i.e. more than the upstream driver.
> >
> > I just realize that this advice is not reflected in the
> > Release Notes yet (please file an SR!), thus: please
> > try "hpsa_allow_any=1" as a kernel commandline option.
> >
> > This will put the hpsa driver in a mode not supported by
> > HP (and subsequently not us, see:
> > https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/scsi/hpsa.txt),
> > but at least you are able use the device for testing.
> >
> > I apologize for any inconvenience, but as also said,
> > this is out of SUSE's control.
> >
> > so long -
> > 	MgE
> >
> >
> > On 2014-06-23 T 16:51 -0400 Tom Parker wrote:
> >> Thanks Matthias.
> >>
> >> Why has the cciss driver been removed from the distro?  I assume that it
> >> is still in the linux kernel.  Is there a reason to deliberately stop
> >> compiling it?
> >>
> >> I am sure that I am not the only person who has tons of older servers
> >> that still work 100% but will be unable to run SLES 12 because of this
> >> change.
> >>
> >> Tom
> >>
> >>
> >> On 21/06/14 09:59 AM, Tom Parker wrote:
> >>> Has the old cciss driver been removed from the kernel?  On my SP3
> >>> systems I see from lspci that both the hspa and cciss drivers are
> >>> available for this PCIID
> >>>
> >>> 0b:08.0 RAID bus controller: Hewlett-Packard Company Smart Array E200i
> >>> (SAS Controller)
> >>>         Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Smart Array E200i
> >>>         Kernel driver in use: cciss
> >>>         Kernel modules: hpsa, cciss
> >>>
> >>> I will have to test beta 9 on an old server on Monday
> >>>
> >>> Thanks
> >>>
> >>> Tom
> >>>
> >>> On 21/06/14 06:22 AM, Matthias G. Eckermann wrote:
> >>>> Hello Tom and all,
> >>>>
> >>>> On 2014-06-20 T 23:44 -0400 Tom Parker wrote:
> >>>>  
> >>>>> I see that the cciss driver for older HP hardware is
> >>>>> no longer supported.  Does this mean it has been
> >>>>> removed from the kernel and is no longer available or
> >>>>> just that SLES will not support systems using this
> >>>>> driver?
> >>>> please see the Release Notes, chapter 4.2.2:
> >>>> https://www.suse.com/releasenotes/x86_64/SUSE-SLES/12/#Driver_Updates.Storage
> >>>>  
> >>>> Compared to other recent distributions, SLES 12 has
> >>>> special code in the hpsa driver to support more of the
> >>>> older controllers, i.e. more than the upstream driver.
> >>>>
> >>>>> We still have many HP BL460 G5 servers running in QA
> >>>>> and Development that have many more years of useful
> >>>>> life in them and all of them use the Hewlett-Packard
> >>>>> Company Smart Array E200i Controller which is listed
> >>>>> as not supported
> >>>> However, unfortunately, the E200i is not among those,
> >>>> where we can implement this.
> >>>>
> >>>> I am afraid, this is out of SUSE's control and should be
> >>>> brought up with the hardware vendor, who also maintains
> >>>> the upstream driver(s).
> >>>>
> >>>> so long -
> >>>> 	MgE
> >>>>
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> sles-beta mailing list
> >>> sles-beta at lists.suse.com
> >>> http://lists.suse.com/mailman/listinfo/sles-beta
> >>
> 
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