GI Patch 28553832 may be needed before you upgrade to 19c

Thanks to my colleague Sebastian Alasino who works in the MAA team out of the UK. Sebas highlighted this issue to. And I’d like to share it with you when you attempt to upgrade Grid Infrastructure to Oracle 19c. If you have the Docker RPM  installed and you were lazy on patching, then GI Patch 28553832 may be needed before you upgrade to 19c.

Photo by Daniel Frank on Unsplash

What is the issue?

If the Docker Engine RPM is installed and your GI version is 12.1.0.2, 12.2.0.1 or 18c below a certain patch level, the CSSD demon fails to run with real-time priority. This will cause issues during upgrade.

At first, check if you have the Docker Engine rpm installed, for instance:

# rpm -qa |grep docker
docker-cli-18.09.1.ol-1.0.5.el7.x86_64
docker-engine-18.09.1.ol-1.0.5.el7.x86_64

If this is the case, then check your GI patch level with “opatch lsinventory“. Unfortunately

• MOS Note: 2539751.1 – Patches to apply before upgrading Oracle GI and DB to 19c or downgrading to previous release

is not very precise in telling you whether you may need this patch or not. But if your patch level is already:

• 18.6.0 (April 2019) or newer
• 12.2.0.1.190416 (April 2019) or newer
• 12.1.0.2.190416 (April 2019) or newer
• 11.2.0.4.191015 (October 2019) or newer

then you don’t need this patch as it is included already in your patch bundle. The patch appears in the 19.1.0 code generically by default.

Which patch do you need to apply?

If you are on a patch level below the ones I listed above, you need to apply patch 28553832 at first before upgrading GI. In MOS Note: 2539751.1 the patch is listed for the database homes, too. But I guess this is only necessary if you are using the OCW (Oracle Clusterware) component from the database home itself (Oracle Restart coming to my mind).

• Patch 28553832

The GI upgrade checks for the presence of this fix:

Is there a workaround?

Yes, you can deinstall the Docker Engine as well as a workaround. I’m just guessing that this is not an option on many cases.

Further Information

• Bug 28553832 – Process Failed to Run in Real-time priority If Docker Engine is Installed
• MOS Note: 2542082.1 – 19c Grid Infrastructure and Database Upgrade steps for Exadata
• MOS Note: 2539751.1 – Patches to apply before upgrading Oracle GI and DB to 19c or downgrading to previous release

–Mike