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#1 2019-11-27 13:05:00

marker5a
Member
Registered: 2010-03-19
Posts: 9

No disks in initramfs on HP Z820

Hello, and thanks for the time!

I have an existing computer that I've been using with 4 SATA disks all pooled together in a ZFS raidz2 pool.  I recently purchased a HP Z820 workstation which has a SAS controller onboard.

Powering the unit on, I can see the drives in the Bios and booting into grub on a USB thumb drive, I can see all of the disksv when I ls on the grub cmdline, but when I boot from grub, I get dropped right away to the shell in the initramfs (rootfs?).  When I ls in the dev folder, there aren't any disks  present (sda,sdb,sdc, etc.), just the usual tty devs, etc.  I've tried it with the fallback linux image as well with similar results.

What I'm wondering is if there are some other modules that need be installed for the initram to see the disks since it's a different controller?

I'm hoping someone has some experience with the HP workstations to give me a little guidance here... thanks as always!

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#2 2019-11-27 19:31:18

loqs
Member
Registered: 2014-03-06
Posts: 17,192

Re: No disks in initramfs on HP Z820

If you can access the network or dump files then upload later from the rescue prompt,
what is the output of the following from the rescue prompt:

dmesg
lspci -nnk

If not please post the output of those commands executed under arch installation media.
See the tip box from pastebin to upload from the console.

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#3 2019-11-29 15:25:22

marker5a
Member
Registered: 2010-03-19
Posts: 9

Re: No disks in initramfs on HP Z820

Thanks for the reply... and sorry for the delay getting back... turkey got in the way smile

So, I ended up creating a fresh pool on the new machine and found similar issues, however, it turns out there is a race condition between the zpool import in the initramfs and the detection of the disks.  There seems to be some documented issues with the mpt3sas driver and not presenting the drives fast enough for the zpool import routine.

Below are the dmesg and lspci -nnk outputs with the new pool... I ended up ditching the old method for the time being.

dmesg
lspci

Where I'm at now is once in the initramfs shell, I can go import the pool and exit the shell to boot into the system... however, initramfs on it's own won't import the pool... again, I believe because of the timing.

I'm trying to utilize the zfs_wait kernel parameter with 30 seconds which *should*, from what I can tell, delay the zpool import, however it's still not making any difference.  Any hints on how I can delay the import?  Or maybe there's something else going on that I'm overlooking?

Thanks again!

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#4 2019-11-29 16:23:53

frostschutz
Member
Registered: 2013-11-15
Posts: 1,409

Re: No disks in initramfs on HP Z820

zfs_wait only waits on the /dev/zfs device, not any drives

you could try rootdelay=60 root=/dev/sdc or (with udev) root=/dev/disk/by-partuuid/... or similar.

without root=/dev/... the rootdelay= is ignored

edit: might need zfs=auto too since you're currently using root=ZFS= which not mentioned in mkinitcpio -H zfs or I'm looking at the wrong things

Last edited by frostschutz (2019-11-29 16:32:46)

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#5 2019-11-29 16:45:43

loqs
Member
Registered: 2014-03-06
Posts: 17,192

Re: No disks in initramfs on HP Z820

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#6 2019-11-30 12:48:37

marker5a
Member
Registered: 2010-03-19
Posts: 9

Re: No disks in initramfs on HP Z820

loqs wrote:

I like the simplicity of this, however, it unfortunately did not solve the problem, but thank you!

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#7 2019-11-30 12:50:16

marker5a
Member
Registered: 2010-03-19
Posts: 9

Re: No disks in initramfs on HP Z820

frostschutz wrote:

zfs_wait only waits on the /dev/zfs device, not any drives

you could try rootdelay=60 root=/dev/sdc or (with udev) root=/dev/disk/by-partuuid/... or similar.

without root=/dev/... the rootdelay= is ignored

edit: might need zfs=auto too since you're currently using root=ZFS= which not mentioned in mkinitcpio -H zfs or I'm looking at the wrong things

I tried all of the above together and sure enough, it booted up, imported and mounted perfectly!  Thank you so much for the info, and also the background on the zfs_wait... good to know.

My plan now is to remove each addition individually and come up with a minimal set of updates to fix it, post it here, and mark solved for completion.

Thanks again for all of your help!

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#8 2019-11-30 13:14:43

frostschutz
Member
Registered: 2013-11-15
Posts: 1,409

Re: No disks in initramfs on HP Z820

marker5a wrote:
loqs wrote:

I like the simplicity of this, however, it unfortunately did not solve the problem, but thank you!

It's odd that this seems to work for some people but not others.

Did you regenerate initcpio after the change?

Either way, glad something worked or you'd have to create a custom sleep/wait-for-device hook.

Last edited by frostschutz (2019-11-30 13:15:05)

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#9 2019-11-30 13:18:20

marker5a
Member
Registered: 2010-03-19
Posts: 9

Re: No disks in initramfs on HP Z820

frostschutz wrote:
marker5a wrote:
loqs wrote:

I like the simplicity of this, however, it unfortunately did not solve the problem, but thank you!

It's odd that this seems to work for some people but not others.

Did you regenerate initcpio after the change?

Either way, glad something worked or you'd have to create a custom sleep/wait-for-device hook.

You're correct... Odd that it works for some.  I did run a new mkinitcpio after adding to zfs.conf... I didn't double check the mod info after updating... I'll try that later just to see that it was at least included in the initramfs.

Anyways, thanks again... Like I said, really appreciate your help!

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