Finnix 110/111 can not find media on the md raid (metadata 0.90) mirrored /boot partition

[Alex Wakizashi]

Hello,

I'm using following GRUB list item to boot Finnix as a rescue system :

menuentry "Finnix x64" {
        insmod part_msdos
        insmod diskfilter
        insmod mdraid09
        insmod ext2
 set root='mduuid/4e509cf9d334c2f1f0ff2635300949c9'
        if [ x$feature_platform_search_hint = xy ]; then
          search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root --hint='mduuid/4e509cf9d334c2f1f0ff2635300949c9' aba25e8e-2c22-4439-a695-d9d61f554377
        else
          search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root aba25e8e-2c22-4439-a695-d9d61f554377
        fi
        insmod iso9660
        loopback loop /finnix.iso
        linux (loop)/boot/x86/linux64 findiso=/finnix.iso toram quiet
        initrd (loop)/boot/x86/initrd.xz
}

Here /dev/md0 is mounted as /boot and is RAID1 with 0.90 metadata (so, it's normally recognized as ext2 filesystem, if any of RAID partitions are mounted directly).

Meanwhile, Finnix media detection doesn't work on such partition, and doesn't recognize RAID as well.

Also, I can't even troubleshoot it - because initial RAM disk doesn't load USB HID drivers.

Placing finnix ISO image in /boot/efi causes even more strange effect - Finnix wrote:
"umount: can't unmount /tmp/testmount_findisobacking: Device or resource busy" followed by "mount: mounting /dev/loop1 on /media/compressed_root failed: Input/Output error"

Disks are fine, so here is some problem with Finnix image detection/mounting logic.

Regards,
  Alex

[Ryan Finnie (fo0bar)]

Sorry for the delay; I didn't realize bugs were being submitted here. Nonetheless, thank you for your report! For more details on recent developments, please see https://blog.finnix.org/2020/05/19/behind-the-scenes-of-finnix-120/ .

Generally, more complicated boot setups like your first example are not supported for the CD finding itself, though now that Finnix 120 uses live-boot for initramfs, it *may* work. OTOH, I've verified the second example (in /boot/efi) definitely does work as of Finnix 120.