yast, lsblk or hwinfo hang after updating to kernel 3.0.101-108.35 on VMware machines.

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Environment

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 Service Pack 4 (SLES 11 SP4)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 Service Pack 2 (SLES 12 SP2)
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 Service Pack 3 (SLES 11 SP3)

Situation

lsblk, hwinfo, yast2 disk (the partitioning module) or other disk accessing applications (e.g. parted) hang.
Using strace to debug the process shows it hangs while accessing the virtual CD-ROM drive:

[...]
3570 lseek(5, 0, SEEK_CUR)             = 0
3570 read(5, "0\n", 4096)              = 2
3570 close(5)                          = 0
3570 munmap(0x7efd4917d000, 4096)      = 0
3570 open("/dev/sr0", O_RDONLY

Resolution

The following kernel releases contain the required fixes:

SLES 11 SP4: 3.0.101-108.38.1
SLES 12 SP2: 4.4.120-92.70.1
SLES 12 SP3: 4.4.120-94.17.1

Change log entry:

- ide-cd: workaround VMware ESXi cdrom emulation bug (bsc#1080813).

Cause

A problem in the emulation code for the virtual CD-ROM drive.

Additional Information

Available Workaround:

Run the following command :

echo options cdrom autoclose=0 >> /etc/modprobe.d/99-local.conf

to create a module options file, then unload and reload the cdrom module again:

rmmod cdrom
modprobe cdrom

In case the CD-ROM drive is in use, this might fail and only a reboot will solve this situation.

If unloading and loading of the module doesn't help you can try to attach CD-ROM device to the virtual machine so that the lsblk command is succesful. This can be achieved for example if you pretend to install the VMware tools and as a consequence it is mounted within the VM.

strace debug command:

The following command may be used to trace the lsblk output:

strace -f -o /tmp/lsblk.out lsblk

Disclaimer

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