Bug#440206: multipath-tools: installing multipath tools causes mkinitramfs to generate an initrd which does not boot

[Guido Guenther]

Hi Ian,
On Thu, Aug 30, 2007 at 06:28:38PM +0100, Ian Campbell wrote:
> My system does not use multipath but I installed multipath-tools to get
> kpartx (I know now this is a separate package). When my ramdisk was
> next generated (new kernel or initramfs-tools I suppose) I ended up with
> an initrd which did not boot (hence severity: critical). This seems to
> be because the multipath tools hooks "dmsetup create" on my root disk
> but do not undo this when no multipath configuration is discovered (or
> whatever I don't really know what is supposed to happen) therefore the
> device is busy when the initrd comes to mount it.
It can't "detect" if you have a multipath configuration since it might
very well be possible that all the other paths are currently not
available. So by building multipath-tools into the initramfs you
made this your root devices:

/dev/mapper/SATA_FUJITSU_MHV2080_NW9UT6C27043-part3

so booting with this device would have worked. Anyway, thanks for the
report! I'll move the initramfs into a separte package.
Thanks,
 -- Guido