action #54335
Updated by riafarov over 4 years ago
## Motivation
WIth AEP DIMMS now being publicly available and SUSE's support of using them as a block device, it is clearly expected from customers to be able to use the central tool of SLES to manage and partition the devices.
We should therefore introduce the YaST2 partitioner support for PMEM devices we already have in SLE15 to SLES12 SP5, specifically since it is planned to be the last service pack on this major codestream.
QA task: https://jira.suse.com/browse/SLE-7141
Dev task: https://jira.suse.com/browse/SLE-7139
Trello: https://trello.com/c/U8pgWSod/1055-2-sle-7065-research-support-for-pmem-in-sle-12-sp5 and https://trello.com/c/YSedYvOT/1111-jscsle-7065-sle12sp5-support-of-pmem-devices
Let me summarize the current status of this.
First a technical remark: the Partitioner in SLE-12-SPX relies on libstorage to detect and manipulate the disks. In SLE-15 it relies on libstorage-ng.
Based on the text of the original feature request, PMEM devices seems to work as desired in SLE-15. That's because libstorage-ng supports them out of the box.
We have adapted the old libstorage to also support the PMEM name schema. That's hopefully all that is needed in order to make the Partitioner in SLE-12-SP5 to work to the same degree that it does in SLE-15. See https://build.suse.de/request/show/196129
Even now that libstorage and libstorage-ng are prepared, there are some bugs regarding missing by-id links that can lead to problems. Both are out of the YaST scope:
In openSUSE Tumbleweed, there are only links to the disk devices but not to the partition devices. See https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1140630
In SLE (both SLE-15-SPX and SLE-12-SP5) there are no links at all for PMEM devices (not even to the disks). See https://bugzilla.suse.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1140631
We have tried booting from a PMEM device (non-EFI) with a modified version of SLE-12-SP5 that included the updated libstorage. In worked fine. EFI booting should also work as long as the EFI firmware of the machine supports PMEM devices (which is expected).
With all that, I would consider this done from the YaST Team point of view.
qemu supports emulation of nvdimm devices, see https://github.com/qemu/qemu/blob/master/docs/nvdimm.txt
We have multiple systems with Intel DCPMEM available at SUSE. Please contact Hannes Reinecke.
## Acceptance criteria
1. Feature is validated according to the specifications
2. Jira QA task is resolved with a comment describing findings
3. Tested scenarios are described in the ticket
4. Follow-up ticket for the automated scenario is created with detailed description of the scenario
## Suggestions
1. legacy boot from PMEM device
2. uefi boot from PMEM device
3. creating/deleting/editing encrypted/non-encrypted partitions on PMEM device in the installation
4. same as 3. but in the installed system
5. testing detection of existing partitions, incl. but not limited to activation of the encrypted partitions on PMEM
6. autoyast installation with PMEM devices
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html/managing_storage_devices/using-nvdimm-persistent-memory-storage_managing-storage-devices
Here is a good documentation on how to configure nvdimm to work in different modes.