I'm trying out F15 under z/VM 5.4. I have no ECKD DASD at my site; I rely
on FCP disks. I try to use z/VM FBA Emulation as much as possible (rather
than zfcp) as it makes disk management much easier.
I tried to install F15 on a guest with FBA minidisks, and the result is a
non-bootable system. At the completion of the installation phase, I tell
the system to Shutdown and it does so cleanly. The re-ipl fails however;
the kernel is unable to find the root filesystem and panics.
Two things are notable. In the kernel output after the reboot, the kernel
command line is about four lines of gibberish (mostly blanks, but a
smattering of random punctuation marks). Also, I tried attaching the disks
to a running system but no valid filesystem was found. (I was trying to
fix what I thought might have just been a problem with zipl, by attaching
the disks to a running system.)
I tried to do a RHEL6 install a while ago, but I could not even get it to
install -- Anaconda had no support for FBA disks. The fact that F15 was
able to successfully go through Anaconda was encouraging, but perhaps it's
not there yet. Has anyone tried a similar install and has experiences to
share?
On a related note, a Kickstart install to FBA disks fails in much the same
way as my prior RHEL6 attempts. In the anaconda.log during install I see
Anaconda successfully finds the DASDs and the partition, but it "ignores"
the partitions and then reports that there are no usable disks.