cryptsetup: lvm is not available -- unable to boot, not asked for FDE password

[Carl Miller]

I recently upgraded to the hwe-16.04 kernel and X server.

I am unable to boot the 4.10 series hwe kernels. At the plymouth splash screen I just see the message, "cryptsetup: lvm is not available" over and over again, and I am never asked for my FDE password to unlock the luks-encrypted root partition. I've observed this in both 4.10.0-33 and 4.10.0-35 kernels.

This never happened with the 4.4 series kernels. In fact, I can still choose a 4.4 series kernel in the grub menu, boot that, and it works fine -- no error message, asks me for my password, mounts root, and off we go.

The error "lvm is not available" is particularly strange in that it shouldn't be needed -- this system has no lvm containers. I only use device-mapper.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.04
Package: linux-image-generic-hwe-16.04 4.10.0.35.37
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.4.0-96.119-generic 4.4.83
Uname: Linux 4.4.0-96-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.1-0ubuntu2.10
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: XFCE
Date: Thu Oct 5 11:42:38 2017
InstallationDate: Installed on 2014-07-22 (1170 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Xubuntu 14.04 LTS "Trusty Tahr" - Release amd64 (20140416.2)
SourcePackage: linux-meta-hwe
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to xenial on 2016-08-08 (423 days ago)

[Carl Miller (chaz-q)]

We ran across another instance of this bug today, on a different system.

A production back-end (no GUI) server had been mistakenly configured to pull packages from xenial-proposed, and it updated to kernel 4.4.0-119 this morning. It then failed to boot with the exact same symptoms described above. It boots just fine when manually selecting the 4.4.0-118 kernel.

Now we're down to one release increment...
4.4.0-118: bug is absent, affected systems boot just fine
4.4.0-119: bug is present, affected systems fail to boot