Raspbian

jessie: initramfs-tools < 0.121 does not support booting by PARTUUID; breaks stock boot sequence

Bug #1697065 reported by Arglebargle on 2017-06-09

This bug affects 1 person

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	Raspbian	New	Undecided	Unassigned

Bug Description

The version of initramfs-tools currently shipping in jessie does not support booting by PARTUUID.

As Raspbian images now ship configured to mount root by PARTUUID this means that loading an initramfs without switching to /dev/mmcblk*, UUID or LABEL root fs path in /boot/cmdline.txt will break the boot sequence.

Minimal repro steps from a fresh install of Raspbian lite (04-10):

Boot fresh image
(optional) apt-get update && apt-get -y dist-upgrade && reboot 0
update-initramfs -c -k `uname -r`
echo "initramfs initrd.img-`uname -r` followkernel" >> /boot/config.txt
reboot

The boot sequence will break trying to locate the root fs under /dev/disk/by-partuuid, see attached photo.

This problem is fixed in initramfs-tools 0.121~rc1 [7469eee] which addresses debian bug #801154 (https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=801154). Posts #17 and #22 contain patches to address the issue - I can confirm that they fix booting by PARTUUID with an initramfs.

See original description