Hello! During the installation of a 2-node Oracle 9.0.1 cluster using both lvm and raw devices I meet a problem that is independent of Oracle - at least it seems to me like that... When I'm binding my raw devices used for Oracle to real hard disk partitions everythings works fine. But with the binding to my created logical volumes I'm receiving errors from Oracle. And I need more raw partitions on the shared disk than Linux can support (due to the one byte minor device number limit). In general I would like to have the great flexibility of the lvm. ;-) So I tried to find out what the reason for the problem is and found amongst other things the following threads: [linux-lvm] Using Oracle with lvm AND rawio: read(512) from /dev/raw/... http://lists.sistina.com/pipermail/linux-lvm/2000-December/003730.html confused about raw-io blocksizes Date: Fri Nov 09 2001 - 19:13:11 EST http://www.uwsg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0111.1/0472.html [suse-oracle] ORA-27044 to create tablespace (Re: [suse-oracle] Raw device) http://lists.suse.com/archive/suse-oracle/2002-Feb/0054.html I tested to read 1k, 2k, 4k and 8k blocks from my raw devices, bound to logical volumes - everything ok, here for the first raw device: $ dd if=/dev/raw/raw1 of=/dev/null bs=1k count=1000 1000+0 records in 1000+0 records out $ dd if=/dev/raw/raw1 of=/dev/null bs=2k count=1000 1000+0 records in 1000+0 records out $ dd if=/dev/raw/raw1 of=/dev/null bs=4k count=1000 1000+0 records in 1000+0 records out $ dd if=/dev/raw/raw1 of=/dev/null bs=8k count=1000 1000+0 records in 1000+0 records out BUT with a block size of 512: $ dd if=/dev/raw/raw1 of=/dev/null bs=512 count=1000 dd: reading `/dev/raw/raw1': Invalid argument 0+0 records in 0+0 records out $ You will find the same error message in the threads above. And _all_ the tests, even the one with a block size of 512 bytes, are running instead _without_ any errors when the used raw devices are bound to real disk partitions! I'm using stock Red Hat 7.1 with some changes made for the Oracle RAC. My concrete problem is that I'm not able to find any concrete hint about what to do. Do I need a newer lvm version? If so, which one? Red Hat 7.1 comes with # grep -i lvm /var/log/messages.1 | tail -2 Jun 14 22:26:08 linmi04 kernel: LVM version 0.9.1_beta2 by Heinz Mauelshagen (18/01/2001) Jun 14 22:26:08 linmi04 kernel: lvm -- Module successfully initialized but without the lvm userland tools, so I installed the appropriate version of them. Or is it (also) a kernel problem? I have to use a recent 2.4 kernel? I needed (for the Oracle RAC) to compile the Red Hat kernel: $ rpm -q kernel-source kernel-source-2.4.2-2 What's about lvm patches? According to PATCHES/README it shouldn't be necessary for 2.4 kernels ("little more than update the lvm source files"). And BLOCK_SIZE in lvm.h? In the thread of this mailing list from December of 2000 (please have a look above) I couldn't find an answer. It's perhaps a little bit off topic here, but due to the certification of Oracle 9.0.1 RAC for Red Hat 7.1 I'm interested in statements about using lvm and raw devices (for Oracle RAC) with Red Hat kernels, too. Perhaps I need just to upgrade to the Red Hat 2.4.9-34 kernel rpm's (there is no newer one for Red Hat 7.1)... but I don't want to try just something out, instead I would like to understand the problem - and to apply a good solution then. ;-) Thanks in advance && bye, Eike _______________________________________________ linux-lvm mailing list linux-lvm@sistina.com http://lists.sistina.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-lvm read the LVM HOW-TO at http://www.sistina.com/lvm/Pages/howto.html