[Bug 1547206] [NEW] Boot stalls on mountall "disk drive not ready" question in multipath-tools >= 0.4.9-3ubuntu7.5

[Tore Anderson]

Public bug reported:

System information: Cisco UCS B200M2 blade, fnic.ko HBA. The system
boots from local storage, but mounts the following file system on an EMC
VNX during bootup:

opt_vnx (3600601603a71320022967e0a1f38e411) dm-0 DGC,VRAID
size=50G features='1 queue_if_no_path' hwhandler='1 emc' wp=rw
|-+- policy='round-robin 0' prio=1 status=active
| |- 1:0:1:0 sdd 8:48 active ready running
| `- 0:0:0:0 sda 8:0  active ready running
`-+- policy='round-robin 0' prio=0 status=enabled
  |- 0:0:1:0 sdb 8:16 active ready running
  `- 1:0:0:0 sdc 8:32 active ready running

/etc/fstab contains:

/dev/mapper/opt_vnx /opt/vnx ext4 noatime 0 2

After upgrading the "multipath-tools" package to version
0.4.9-3ubuntu7.5 or higher, the system can no longer boot without manual
intervention. Instead, the following question is asked (by mountall(8))
on the console:

The disk drive for /opt/vnx is not ready yet or not present.
keys:Continue to wait, or Press S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery

Waiting does nothing useful. Pressing "S" allows the boot to run to
completion, and the "opt_vnx" *is* present when logging in to a
completely booted system. However, it seems that this is discovered
*after* the mountall(8) question appears and is skipped, as this log
line appears later on in the boot process:

 * Discovering and coalescing multipaths...
[ OK ]

Downgrading multipath-tools to version 0.4.9-3ubuntu7.4 does resolve the
problem, and allows the system to boot normally without manual
intervention. Note that the dependent "kpartx" package does *not* need
to be downgraded also, if this is left on version 0.4.9-3ubuntu7.9 it
will still boot fine.

We experience this problem on serveral other systems apart from the one
described in this bug report.

** Affects: multipath-tools (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1547206

Title:
  Boot stalls on mountall "disk drive not ready" question in multipath-
  tools >= 0.4.9-3ubuntu7.5

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