NVMe boot drives not supported - failing in generating initramfs
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
initramfs-tools |
Fix Released
|
Unknown
|
|||
initramfs-tools (Ubuntu) |
Fix Released
|
Medium
|
Guilherme G. Piccoli | ||
Trusty |
Fix Released
|
High
|
Guilherme G. Piccoli | ||
Xenial |
Fix Released
|
Medium
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
[Impact]
When creating the initramfs image, mkinitramfs has multiple options on how to include modules. The default (and most common) one is the "MODULES=most", which includes the majority of filesystem modules and all the block device drivers. One other option is "MODULES=dep", which tries to descend in the sysfs hierarchy and guess modules to add, with the goal of reduce the size of initramfs.
For the MODULES=dep case, the initramfs-tools hook-functions script cannot translate nvmeXnYpZ to nvmeXnY block device, so it's failing in the sysfs lookup, so it does not build the initram disk.
Upstream solution is composed of at least 2 patches (it's a series, but the 2 below are really the needed ones):
commit 3cb744c9
Author: Ben Hutchings <email address hidden>
hook-functions: Rewrite block device sysfs lookup to be generic
commit 8ac52dc0
Author: Ben Hutchings <email address hidden>
hook-functions: Include modules for all components of a multi-disk device
Instead of doing the huge backport, we added another sed substitution: currently the script has substitutions for sdX and hdX, in order to convert sda1 to sda, for example. The new substitution converts nvmeXnYpZ to nvmeXnY.
It's less intrusive than the full backport, since this is a minimal SRU to Trusty only.
[Test Case]
1. Install Trusty with rootfs in a multi-disk(md) array composed of two nvme partitions - in my tests, I've used a RAID1.
(lsblk output of my test env:
nvme0n1 259:0 0 10G 0 disk
└─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 10G 0 part
└─md0 9:0 0 10G 0 raid1 /
nvme1n1 259:2 0 10G 0 disk
└─nvme1n1p1 259:3 0 10G 0 part
└─md0 9:0 0 10G 0 raid1 /
)
2. Once system is booted, modify the "/etc/initramfs
3. Update your initramfs by running something like:
"update-initramfs -u -k <your kernel version>"
The initramfs creating procedure will fail, unless the patch from this LP is present.
[Regression Potential]
If the sed expression was somewhat broken, we could have an issue generating initiramfs when MODULES is set to "dep", even for generic block devices (like regular HDDs).
[Other Info]
* This issue is based on Debian bug #785147:
https:/
* Only Trusty is affected, Xenial and late contains the full fix as mentioned above :
$ git describe --contains 8ac52dc0
v0.121_rc1~11
$ git describe --contains 3cb744c9
v0.121_rc1~11
$ rmadison initramfs-tools
initramfs-tools | 0.103ubuntu4 | trusty | source, all
==> initramfs-tools | 0.103ubuntu4.10 | trusty-updates | source, all
initramfs-tools | 0.122ubuntu8 | xenial | source, all
initramfs-tools | 0.122ubuntu8.11 | xenial-updates | source, all
initramfs-tools | 0.125ubuntu12 | artful | source, all
initramfs-tools | 0.125ubuntu12.1 | artful-updates | source, all
initramfs-tools | 0.130ubuntu3 | bionic | source, all
initramfs-tools | 0.130ubuntu6 | cosmic | source, all
affects: | linux (Ubuntu) → initramfs-tools (Ubuntu) |
Changed in initramfs-tools (Ubuntu Xenial): | |
importance: | Undecided → Medium |
status: | New → Fix Released |
Changed in initramfs-tools (Ubuntu Trusty): | |
assignee: | nobody → Guilherme G. Piccoli (gpiccoli) |
importance: | Undecided → High |
status: | New → In Progress |
milestone: | none → trusty-updates |
Changed in initramfs-tools (Ubuntu): | |
status: | In Progress → Fix Released |
importance: | High → Medium |
milestone: | trusty-updates → none |
description: | updated |
description: | updated |
Fixed in Debian