lvm2 mapper changes breaking and fixing cryptsetup

[Paul Millar]

Hi,

This is a friendly email to mention that changes in lvm2 seem to have had an 
adverse affect on the cryptsetup package.  More recent changes have fixed this 
problem but I thought you guys might be interested in knowing the problem.  
For more background, please see bugs #544487 and #544773.

I believe changes in the fairly recent past resulted in /dev/mapper/* becoming 
sym-links pointing to /dev/dm-* files which were the actual devices; previously 
it was previously the other way around.  It appears that this change resulted 
in subsequently created initrd images were bereft of the file 
config/config.d/cryptdisk (for people with LUKS encrypted partitions).  This, in 
turn, prevented people from booting.

With the very recent update of lvm2 to 2.02.51-3, the old behavior 
(/dev/mapper/* as devices, /dev/dm-* being sym-links) was restored.  It's 
unclear to me why this has happened as the change-log for lvm2 has this change 
happening with the previous version (2.02.51-2, to close bug #542422).  
However, installing 2.02.51-3 appears to have fixed the problem with 
cryptsetup.

There may be good reasons to move to /dev/dm-* as the actual devices (I 
couldn't say! I know nothing about this); but, if so, it would be worth 
coordinating this change with the cryptsetup package people.

HTH,

Paul.