Loading OCFS2 in RHEL5 ELS

Solution Unverified - Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Extended Lifecycle Support (ELS)
  • Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC)
  • ocfs2 filesystem

Issue

When loading the new kernels for RHEL5 ELS, existing third party modules such as ocfs2 modules no longer load.

Resolution

In order to get the modules to load the following steps (which are the same for any third party modules) should be taken:

  1. If the software is already up to date, installed and working in the previous kernel version, copy the modules from that tree into the newly installed kernel tree (preferrably in the extra subdirectory)

    cd /lib/modules/2.6.18-406.el5/kernel/fs
find ocfs2 -print | cpio -pdmv /lib/modules/`uname -r`/extra

    if the software is not previously installed or not up to date, you'll want to grab the latest from oracle's site and install it first

    rpm -i --noscripts --nodeps ocfs2-2.6.18-406.el5-1.4.10-1.el5.x86_64.rpm
cd /lib/modules/2.6.18-406.el5/kernel/fs
find ocfs2 -print | cpio -pdmv /lib/modules/`uname -r`/extra

  2. Resolve module dependencies with depmod.

    depmod -ae `uname -r`

  3. Load the modules (optionally use --force if necessary)

    modprobe ocfs2

Root Cause

Many third party kernel module vendors will put their modules in non-standard locations which then causes the kernel upgrade tools to not consider their locations. In this particular case there have been no changes in the kernel ABI or code paths that the ocfs2 modules depend on and it is simply in a location where it is not picked up by /sbin/weak-modules to be considered for inclusion in the new kernel.

See also What is OCFS2 and is it Supported by Red Hat

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