[Bug 251164] Re: boot impossible due to missing initramfs failure hook / event driven initramfs

[Teemu Toivola]

Commenting here since bug #324997 has been marked as duplicate and the
behaviour appears to have changed since the original report. With Ubuntu
12.04, booting with a degraded raid (due to missing disk) causes the
boot process to stop at "Begin: Waiting for encrypted source device...
...". There's a timeout of around 180 seconds after which a busybox
prompt becomes available. It's possible to continue from that prompt by
commanding "mdadm --run /dev/mdX" followed with ctrl-d. That causes
cryptsetup to find the device, prompt for a passphrase and continue the
boot procedure.

I noticed that this problem occurs only when a disk is missing from the
raid. Setting one disk as failed and then booting with all disks but
still in degraded state will result in some warnings during the boot
process but there will be no waiting for timeouts or busybox prompts.

Another suggestion I found in several places and ended up testing was to
replace the UUID in /etc/crypttab with the device itself (/dev/mdX).
That results in no timeout and cryptsetup asking for the passphrase but
it will not accept the correct passphrase as long as any disk from the
raid is missing. There's no busybox prompt available either resulting in
a system that can't boot.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/251164

Title:
  boot impossible due to missing initramfs failure hook / event driven
  initramfs

Status in “cryptsetup” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged
Status in “mdadm” package in Ubuntu:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  the cryptsetup package needs proper integration into the initramfs
  failure hooks

  The system must not assume a particular layered setup or sequence of
  appearance of (hotplug/udev/crypt/md/degraded-md/lvm) devices.

  It must be able to boot with any possible combination raid, lvm, crypt
  combination that the debian-installer can produce.

  
  Description of solution in comment #15

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