The applications may issue the start of an expansion, but then disappear. The Firmware is responsible for completing the job with the help of the driver. We issue a scsi_rescan_device when the job is completed, removable bit set turns off the capacity & partition table caching. We would need a similar exported kernel interface for the aacraid driver to call after we receive the scan requests via the event (AIF) stream from the Firmware. I can not propose adding a flag to scsi_rescan_device, as that would change an interface, so a new call scsi_rescan_device_blkrrpart? We have external RAID enclosures that report they are removable devices so that they may also transition through expansion. It is merely half a lie; it does indicate that the media can change ;-} -- Mark -----Original Message----- From: James Bottomley [mailto:James.Bottomley@xxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Wednesday, May 23, 2007 1:07 PM To: Salyzyn, Mark Cc: Hannes Reinecke; SCSI Mailing List Subject: RE: [PATCH] Un-remove aacraid devices On Wed, 2007-05-23 at 12:35 -0400, Salyzyn, Mark wrote: > NAK > > This will break all our management applications, and will not allow us to manipulate the array configurations from within Linux. This will also break online expansion of capacity. > > This flag has been set from the beginning to allow partition tables, capacity and device locking to be changed without requiring an intervening reboot or needing the device to be taken offline. Fixed disk result in these pieces of information being cached. I thought this problem had been solved since at least 2000 (when LifeKeeper ran into the same issue) by sending the BLKRRPART ioctl to the device ... whether removable or not, this forces a reread of all the vital information (always providing nothing has the nodes open, of course, we can't physically yank the information out of applications using it). If there's something BLKRRPART isn't doing we can probably fix it ... that's certainly better than lying to the kernel about the devices. James - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-scsi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
