2.2 Known Issues

ACPI

One some systems you might see ACPI-related error messages in dmesg similar to the following:

ACPI Error: [CDW1] Namespace lookup failure, AE_NOT_FOUND
        ACPI Error: Method parse/execution failed [_SB_._OSC||\||]
        ACPI Error: Field [CDW3] at 96 exceeds Buffer [NULL] size 64 (bits)]]>

These messages, which are not fatal, are caused by bugs in the BIOS. Contact your system vendor for a BIOS update. (Bug ID 13100702)

ASM

Calling the oracleasm init script, /etc/init.d/oracleasm, with the parameter scandisks can lead to error messages about missing devices similar to the following:

oracleasm-read-label: Unable to open device "device": No such file or directory

However, the device actually exists. You can ignore this error message, which is triggered by a timing issue. Only use the init script to start and stop the oracleasm service. All other options, such as scandisks, listdisk, and createdisk, are deprecated. For these and other administrative tasks, use /usr/sbin/oracleasm instead. (Bug ID 13639337)

bnx2x driver

When using the bnx2x driver in a bridge, disable Transparent Packet Aggregation (TPA) by including the statement options bnx2x disable_tpa=1 in /etc/modprobe.conf. (Bug ID 14626070)

btrfs

Running btrfs filesystem balance converts a non-RAID or concatenated file system setup to RAID-0 after adding a new device. (Bug ID 13715389)
Converting an existing ext2, ext3, or ext4 root file system to btrfs does not carry over the associated security contexts that are stored as part of a file's extended attributes. With SELinux enabled and set to enforcing mode, you might experience many permission denied errors after reboot, and the system might be unbootable. To avoid this problem, enforce automatic file system relabeling to run at bootup time. To trigger automatic relabeling, create an empty file named .autorelabel (for example, by using touch) in the file system's root directory before rebooting the system after the initial conversion. The presence of this file instruct SELinux to recreate the security attributes for all files on the file system. If you forget to do this and rebooting fails, either temporarily disable SELinux completely by adding selinux=0 to the kernel boot parameters, or disable enforcing of the SELinux policy by adding enforcing=0. (Bug ID 13806043)

A failing RAID1 disk might result in a kernel panic with the error kernel:

BTRFS error (device (null)) in btree_writepage_io_failed_hook:3662: \
          IO failure (Error occurred while writing out btree at offset).

(Bug ID 16262571)

The btrfs subvolume get-default command lists all existing subvolumes instead of only the default subvolume. (Bug ID 13815433)
The btrfs filesystem defragment command exits with an exit code of 20 even if it succeeds. (Bug ID 13714531)
Commands such as du might show inconsistent results for file sizes in a btrfs file system when the number of bytes that is under delayed allocation is changing. (Bug ID 13096268)
Btrfs has a limit of 237 hard links to a file. Attempting to create more than this number of links results in the error Too many links. (Bug ID 16278563)

CPU microcode update failures on PVM/PVHVM guests

When running Oracle Linux with UEK R2, you might see error messages in dmesg or /var/log/messages similar to this one:

microcode: CPU0 update to revision 0x6b failed.

You can ignore this warning. You do not need to upgrade the microcode for virtual CPUs as presented to the guest. (Bug ID 12576264, 13782843)

I/O scheduler

The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel uses the deadline scheduler as the default I/O scheduler. For the Red Hat Compatible Kernel, the default I/O scheduler is the cfq scheduler.

libfprint

The following message might appear in dmesg or /var/log/messages:

WARNING! power/level is deprecated; use power/control instead.

The USB subsystem in UEK R2 deprecates the power/level sysfs attribute in favor of the power/control attribute. The libfprint fingerprinting library triggers this warning via udev rules that try to use the old attribute first. You can safely ignore this warning. The setting of the appropriate power level still succeeds. (Bug ID 13523418)

Nouveau kernel driver is not compatible with NVIDIA graphics driver

After upgrading to UEK R2, the NVIDIA driver upgrade script does not correctly blacklist the Nouveau kernel driver. To blacklist the driver, append rdblacklist=nouveau nouveau.modeset=0 to the kernel boot parameters in /boot/grub/grub.conf.

sched_yield() settings for CFS

For the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel, kernel.sched_compat_yield=1 is set by default. For the Red Hat Compatible Kernel, kernel.sched_compat_yield=0 is used by default.

udev

A message similar to the following might be recorded in dmesg or /var/log/messages at boot time:

udevd (pid): /proc/pid/oom_adj is deprecated, please use /proc/pid/oom_score_adj instead.

The udev process uses the deprecated oom_adj kernel interface to prevent it from being killed if the system runs short of memory. You can safely ignore the message as the action still succeeds. To prevent the message from occurring, install the package udev-147-2.42.el6.arch.rpm or higher for Oracle Linux 6, or udev-095-14.29.0.1.el5.arch.rpm or higher for Oracle Linux 5. (Bug ID 13655071 and 13712009)

Virtualization

When booting UEK R2 as a 32-bit PVHVM guest, you can safely ignore the following kernel message:

register_vcpu_info failed:
          err=-38

(Bug ID 13713774)