Ubuntu
multipath-tools package

  1. Bug #1429327
  2. Comment #13

Comment 13 for bug 1429327

Revision history for this message
Steve Langasek (vorlon) wrote : Re: ISST-LTE: system drops to initramfs after install on multipath disk

Architecturally speaking, I think it's a bug that installing to multipath results in the boot config pointing to a UUID for the root device. In all other cases, we use identifiers for all filesystems (root or otherwise) which are "guaranteed" to be both stable and unique. (For LVM, this is the LV path and not the UUID since UUIDs are not unique in the face of snapshots; otherwise we use the UUID.)

Given that we *know* that the UUID is not unique in the multipath scenario, and know this at install time, I think it's wrong for us to configure the system to reference filesystems via this non-unique identifier. I would argue instead that:

 - multipath-tools should (if it doesn't already) create a symlink for the device which includes the UUID, but is only ever created once multipath is initialized
 - the fstab and bootloader should be configured to refer to this symlink, not the non-unique UUID

This should address a number of issues with the initramfs, including allowing event-driven assembly of the multipath devices instead of the current blocking script approach.