Home / server / Questions / 560132
Accepted
kockiren
Asked: 2013-12-10 05:25:15 +0800 CST

What "PAL Shim AllocRequest returning NULL" meens?

  • 772

On a HP DL380e Gen8 with Dynamics Smart Array and SAS RAID installed I try to install Centos, after load the RAID Driver from HP Support Site I can access the RAID and do the installation.

The installation works fine and my new Centos Boot on the HP Proliant Server, but when I take a look into the /var/log/messages there is a lot of (>100 per second) this lines in the log file:

Dec  9 14:03:27 server01 kernel: PAL Shim AllocRequest returning NULL
Dec  9 14:03:27 server01 kernel: PAL Shim AllocRequest returning NULL
Dec  9 14:03:27 server01 kernel: PAL Shim AllocRequest returning NULL
Dec  9 14:03:27 server01 kernel: PAL Shim AllocRequest returning NULL
Dec  9 14:03:27 server01 kernel: PAL Shim AllocRequest returning NULL
Dec  9 14:03:27 server01 kernel: PAL Shim AllocRequest returning NULL

What does this mean?

centos6

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The solution from the Red Hat paywalled support site says:

    • Issue: message output "PAL Shim AllocRequest returning NULL" iteratively.
    • Environment: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 with HP-tools(third-party package)
    • Resolution: Update 'hpvsa' module provided from HP, the above message is suppressed.
    • Root Cause: The 'hpvsa' module from HP is an old version.

    So in this case, I should add that the Dynamic Smart Array controller is not a good solution for most environments. It requires a non-standard driver (compared to the traditional CCISS/HPSA that higher-end Smart Array controllers use). I would suggest updating the driver for your system, as that's the cause of the message flood.

    • 1

  2. As ewwhite wrote the problem is an old driver, to update your Dynamic Smart Array Driver try this:

    In centos add a new repo, add following file: /etc/yum.repos.d/HP-SPP.repo with this content:

     [HP-SPP]
name=HP Software Delivery Repository for SPP
baseurl=http://downloads.linux.hp.com/SDR/downloads/SPP/RHEL/$releasever/$basearch/current
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0

    Now you can update with yum update and the message log will be clean.

    • 0