SLES: Additional Software Driver Added May Not Work

In SLES 11, when attempting to load an unsupported driver, an error is generated and the components will not start or load. For example, if you have an InfiniBand PCIe EM installed and are attempting to load openibd, opensmd and the HCA driver, SLES might flag it as an unsupported driver and prevent the driver from loading:

#/etc/init.d/opensmd start
OpenSM not installed
#/etc/init.d/openibd start
Loading eHCA driver: [FAILED]
Loading HCA driver and Access Layer: [FAILED]

All supported Linux kernel modules contain an internal “supported” flag which denotes that module as being officially supported by Novell. Beginning with SLES 11, modules that do not contain this flag are prevented from being loaded automatically or manually by the modprobe command. This is the default configuration of SLES 11 servers, but loading unsupported modules can be allowed through a configuration change.

Workaround

To allow the loading of unsupported modules in SLES 11, set allow_unsupported_modules 1 in etc/modprobe.d/unsupported-modules.

After making this change, modules missing the “supported“ flag will be allowed to load.

For more on the SLES 11 new module probe rule, do a search of the Novell Knowledge Base (http://www.novell.com/support/search.do) on document ID: 7002793.