ibm and ibmVSCSIS

ibmvscsi is the name of the virtual scsi for ibm pSeries and iSeries machines. The client part is in the kernel since long time. The server part is not.

There are several versions of the server part floating around, one was submitted to linux upstream and rejected, the others was directly pushed into the SLES kernel. SLES 10.1 have one in there 2.6.16 kernel.

Now I wanted to update the kernel of my vioserver to something newer than 2.6.13, I wanted 2.6.17. The ibmvscsis is easily ported -- some of the constants was renamed -- and installed. As I wanted to test it in my kernel test environment, I only booted a minimal set, the vioserver themself, which provides scsi and network for the other partitions, the control partition, which is used for easy control, my own development partition and my kernel test environment. After a short time, the software on the kernel test partitions begins to segfault and dpkg crys about broken tar archives. After that also my own development partition shows the same behaviour.

The result:

• / of the control partition is partialy broken, can be repaired.
• / of my development guest is completely broken.
• /srv of my development guest is partialy broken.
• /home is okay puh.
• / of the kernel test partitions are unknown.

This is the story of a simple kernel upgrade, which is not finished after 6 hours and a part of a company which wants support for there hardware but don't want work with Linux upstream. The communication with the Cell and zSeries developers works fine, with the pSeries not.