Required RHEL versions for SGIO support in virtual machines
Environment
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8, 9, 10
- Virtualization
SGIO(SCSI Generic I/O, also known asSG_IO)
Issue
- Is using SCSI Passthrough of LUNs supported?
- What versions are required for support and correct failover behavior of multipath LUNs-backed virtual machine disks when using a syscall to send SCSI commands to devices (
SGIO)? - What RHEL KVM host versions support
SGIO? - What are the required RHEL KVM host versions to use virtual disk devices devices of the
lunorhostdevtype? - Virtual Machines pause with an IO error when multipath failovers occur.
Resolution
- The following support mapping applies when the disk uses the type
lunor passed through ashostdev(both enableSGIO). - The support mapping applies both when a multipath device is used as a backing device, and when a non-multipath device is used.
| RHEL Host Version | Supported | Minimum required host Kernel | Minimum required host qemu-kvm |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8 | No | - | - |
| 9.0 to 9.3 | No | - | - |
| 9.4 | Yes | 5.14.0-427.74.1.el9_4 | 8.2.0-11.el9_4.14 |
| 9.5 | No | - | - |
| 9.6 | Yes | 5.14.0-570.24.1.el9_6 | 9.1.0-15.el9_6.7 |
| 9.7 or newer | Yes | any | any |
| 10.0 | No | - | - |
| 10.1 or newer | Yes | any | any |
-
The table above applies to the Host package versions. The Guest OS and its version can be any Certified Guest Operating System.
-
Due to life-cycle and additional complexity, the changes introduced in 9.4.z will not be supported in RHEL 9.2 or lower versions, such as RHEL8.
-
For detailed steps on how to configure SCSI Passthrough, see Documentation - 14.10. Configuring SCSI passthrough for virtual machines.
-
For detailed steps on how to configure SCSI Passthrough with SCSI Reservation (S3PR), see Documentation - 14.11. Configuring SCSI3-Persistent Reservation for virtual machines.
-
For detailed steps on how to to configure SCSI Passthrough and allow custom SCSI commands, see How to setup LUN Passthrough with support for custom SCSI commands on RHEL KVM?.
Root Cause
- In previous RHEL versions,
SGIOwas unsupported due to problems with multipath failovers. In later versions of RHEL, the handling of multipath failovers has been improved.
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