Chapter 13. Reporting Errors and Bugs

Just telling us that LVM did not work does not provide us with enough information to help you. We need to know about your setup and the various components of your configuration. The first thing you should do is check the linux-lvm mailing list archives to see if someone else has already reported the same bug. If you do not find a bug report for a problem similar to yours you should collect as much of the following information as possible. The list is grouped into three categories of errors.

• For compilation errors:

  1. Detail the specific version of LVM you have. If you extracted LVM from a tarball give the name of the tar file and list any patches you applied. If you acquired LVM from the Public CVS server, give the date and time you checked it out.

  2. Provide the exact error message. Copy a couple of lines of output before the actual error message, as well as, a couple of lines after. These lines occasionally give hints as to why the error occurred.

  3. List the steps, in order, that produced the error. Is the error reproducible? If you start from a clean state does the same sequence of steps reproduce the error?

• For LVM errors:

  1. Include all of the information requested in the compilation section.

  2. Attach a short description of your hardware: types of machines and disks, disks interface (SCSI, FC, NBD). Any other tidbits about your hardware you feel is important.

  3. Include the output from pinfo -s

  4. The command line used to make LVM and the file system on top of it.

  5. The command line used to mount the file system.

• When LVM trips a panic trap:

  1. Include all of the information requested in two sections above.

  2. Provide the debug dump for the machine. This is best accomplished if you are watching the console output of the computer over a serial link, since you can't very well copy and paste from a panic'd machine, and it is very easy to mistype something if you try to copy the output by hand.

This can be a lot of information. If you end up with more than a couple of files, tar and gzip them into a single archive. Submit this compressed archive file to lvm-devel along with a short description of the error.