Subject: Re: [vserver] Unable to Start one Guest after kernel/util-vserver upgrade
From: Herbert Poetzl <herbert@13thfloor.at>
Date: Fri, 4 Jun 2010 15:54:59 +0200

On Fri, Jun 04, 2010 at 10:15:01PM +0930, Mike O'Connor wrote:
> 
> > what was it running before?

> 2.6.26.5-vs2.3.0.35.6

> >> Any ideas, there is alot more information I could give but
> >> someone out there might just know the answer.

> > my best guess with this really minimal information
> > would be that you upgraded from a 2.6.26/27 kernel
> > and now need to fix up the filesystem attributes
> > (but just a guess :)

> Not sure what that means, I check the permission and they 
> seem ok for the root direct and the level below that.

debian did pick a test kernel/patch which uses a different
set for all Linux-VServer specific file system (xattr) flags
than the other kernels (this was immediately found to be a
bad idea, and changed in the next release, but still debian
did not pick up on that change) 

the result is that whenever you switch to or from such a
kernel, you need to fixup the filesystem to make the guests
work again (problem is worse with unification, without you
usually only have to remove all barrier flags and set the
barriers you want again)

this is a well known issue, and debian promised to provide
some kind of upgrade scripts, unfortunately it doesn't seem
that there are any and of course other distros re-used the
debian kernels as well ...

http://linux-vserver.org/Installation_on_Debian#Issues_with_the_current_2.6.26_Kernel

best,
Herbert

> Mike