Server Team 20080930 meeting minutes

[Ante Karamatic]

On Tue, 30 Sep 2008 19:50:35 -0400
Mathias Gug <mathiaz at ubuntu.com> wrote:

> ==== DRBD ====
> 
> ivoks reported that DRBD was broken in Intrepid. The kernel module
> (8.2.6) isn't working with the tools (8.0.12) currently in the
> archive. He also added that updating the tools to 8.2.6 wouldn't fix
> the issue. He successfully tested 8.2.7rc1 (both for the kernel
> module and the userspace tools).
> 
> ACTION: ivoks to send the drbd patch to the ubuntu-kernel mailing
> list to get 8.2.7rc1 in intrepid
> 
> ACTION: ivoks to upload 8.2.7 tools to a PPA ready for testing and
> sponsoring

After a week of debugging, solution was trivial. There's no need to
move to 8.2.7rc1, since we don't get any benefits from it. I've
uploaded userspace tools to my ppa[1], so feel free to review it.
Basically, there is only one very small change compared to our already
existing diff with Debian in Hardy. No kernel change is needed.

This problem was caused by a small change in Ubuntu's kernel, that we
weren't aware of. Drbd's kernel connector ID in Hardy was 0x4, while it
got changed to 0x6 during Intrepid's kernel development. This produced
problems, since userspace tools were still compiling with 0x4 as a
connector ID. That's why userspace couldn't connect driver (as
described in [2]). In Intrepid's kernel, 0x4 ID was assigned to
framebuffer device.

I strongly suggest uploading new version of drbd8 in Intrepid. For one,
current userspace tools are unusable, and, we can't guarantee that
drbd8-utils can't do some harm to frame buffer device :D

IMHO, this bugs shows that there is room for improvement of
communication between kernel and server team.

[1] https://launchpad.net/~ivoks/+archive
[2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/271254