Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX 5.5 - S 2010, Manual

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Chapter 1. Package Updates
170
This update provides the following enhancement:
* this package contains the 2009-09-27 update to Intel's microcode. As of 2010-01-22, this is the most
recent version of the microcode available from Intel. (
BZ#526802
1463
)
All users running systems based on Intel processors are encouraged to install this update, which adds
the most up-to-date microcode data from Intel to /etc/firmware as required. Note: a system reboot is
necessary for the this update to take effect.
1.123. mkinitrd
1.123.1. RHBA-2010:0295: bug fix and enhancement update
The
mkinitrd
utility creates file system images for use as initial ramdisk (initrd) images.
These updated packages address the following bugs:
• booting a Storage Area Network (SAN) from a replicated Logical Unit Number (LUN) following a loss
of the primary site would fail when doing array-based synchronous data replication to a remote site.
This was due to the fact that the initrd on the replicated LUN is configured to see the World Wide
Identifier (WWID) of the primary LUN only. A patch has been applied that allows for the creation of
all multipath devices so that the replicated LUN is visible for booting. It should be noted that some
manual configuration is required following the installation of the updated package:
1. ensure that
multipath.conf
has the correct stanzas for
both
multipath devices.
2. run
mkinitrd
again.
A replicated LUN will now successfully boot provided:
a. the
multipath.conf
in the initrd does not blacklist the new LUN and;
b.
/var/lib/multipath/bindings
in the initrd is either empty or contains an entry binding
mpath0 (or the device originally installed to) to the replicated LUN's WWID.
(
BZ#438887
1464
)
•
scsi_model devflag
options appended to
/etc/modprobe.conf
can be of the form: “options
scsi_mod dev_flags="HITACHI:OPEN-9 -SUN:0x240” to specify more than one SCSI model.
These strings are written as arguments to the
insmod
command within the
initrd
script. The
leading spaces of the second model name in the above example were incorrectly read as a single
space by the
nash
command resulting in the
/proc/scsi/device_info
file containing invalid
strings. A user specifying a SCSI model in this way would have to manually edit the
/proc/
scsi/device_info
file as a result. A patch has been applied to
nash.c
to correctly handle the
quoted string following the
dev_flag
argument. The string is now written to the
/proc/scsi/
device_info
file in the correct format. (
BZ#467850
1465
)
•
mkinitrd
uses a global variable
rootdev
to store the name of the root device. This is either
auto-detected or passed in via the command line
--rootdev=
parameter. Changes applied to
mkinitrd
to support
boot from multipath
introduced the local
rootdev
variable. This
variable overrides the global variable resulting in an incorrect root device, such as a component
1463
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=526802