Bug#724484: dmsetup: initrd fails to configure RAID (with root LV on it)

[Thorsten Glaser]

Package: dmsetup
Version: 2:1.02.77-6+b1
Severity: serious
Justification: makes the system not boot

Hi,

after about two weeks uptime in sid I decided to reboot
because there is a new kernel, but both the new and the
old fail to come up (because the initrd was regenerated
apparently).

My setup is: two HDDs with a swap and a 0xDA partition,
each, the latter backing a RAID-1 array:

md1 : active raid1 sda2[0] sdb2[1]
      311390400 blocks super 1.2 [2/2] [UU]

Inside /dev/md1 there's an LVM pv, vg, with the lv that
hosts the root filesystem (no separate /boot since GRUB
manages just fine).

I ended up in the (initramfs) shell with both 3.10-[23]
with cat /proc/mdstat being empty. Manually running…

$ mdadm --assemble --scan
$ lvm pvscan
$ lvm vgscan
$ lvm lvscan

… made everything come up as needed, so why doesn't the
initrd do that?

I did manage to boot into the system by editing the GRUB
command line and adding “rootdelay=5” even though it did
not delay at all. I don't even claim to understand what,
and why, is going on, but I normally expect such a setup
to boot out-of-the-box in 2013, and I especially consider
requiring manual changes like this to be unacceptable for
a major GNU distribution, and a pretty standard setup, in
2013; imagine this being a headless server which suddenly
doesn’t come up any more… (this setup i̲̲s̲ common on server
systems, after all)!

-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable'), (100, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 3.10-3-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/lksh

Versions of packages dmsetup depends on:
ii  libc6               2.17-93
ii  libdevmapper1.02.1  2:1.02.77-6+b1
ii  libudev1            204-5
ii  util-linux          2.20.1-5.5

dmsetup recommends no packages.

dmsetup suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information