Does anyone know the prevalence of computers shipping with Intel Smart Response Technology (binds SSD and HDD, using SSD as a cache) enabled? And should there be an RFE for anaconda to identify such configurations?
There are some products that come this way, and linux does not support this. The result is the installer doesn't see any disk as an install target. So it's unlikely the existing OS and configuration will be negatively impacted. However, since there's no error message, the hapless user is left wondering why they can't install Fedora.
The gist is that Intel leverages imsm metadata on-disk, which md/mdadm sees an attribute it doesn't recognize and therefore won't assemble the raid (which it can't do since the md driver doesn't support ISRT). Since this attribute is recognized and isn't supported, anaconda could have enough information to flag the user about this configuration and tell them it isn't supported.
See this bug for details: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=890881
Chris Murphy
Chris Murphy wrote:
Does anyone know the prevalence of computers shipping with Intel Smart Response Technology (binds SSD and HDD, using SSD as a cache) enabled? And should there be an RFE for anaconda to identify such configurations?
The computers I have seen with ISRT have it disabled by default.
I'd recommend posting to the linux-raid list or anaconda list to see who needs to do what.
On Sep 24, 2013, at 1:41 PM, Michael Cronenworth mike@cchtml.com wrote:
Chris Murphy wrote:
Does anyone know the prevalence of computers shipping with Intel Smart Response Technology (binds SSD and HDD, using SSD as a cache) enabled? And should there be an RFE for anaconda to identify such configurations?
The computers I have seen with ISRT have it disabled by default.
Well there's at least a pile of HP Envy's that are coming with it on by default, with a small (I think around 64MB) SSD. I'm wondering if there's more than this, or if we're already talking about 2 million machines.
I'd recommend posting to the linux-raid list or anaconda list to see who needs to do what.
Since md recognizes the metadata on disk and knows the (ISRT) attribute that's set isn't supported, I think it's up to anaconda. However, the question is about prevalence and if this is something they should put resources into identifying. There's really nothing to be done by the installer other than saying "hey yeah you're using IRST and we don't support that."
Chris Murphy